Maldonado-Chaparro Adriana A, Dougherty Liam R, Hayes Loren D, Ebensperger Luis
Escuela de Ciencias e Ingeniería, Universidad del Rosario, Bogota, Colombia.
Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Konstanz, Germany.
R Soc Open Sci. 2025 Jul 23;12(7):250691. doi: 10.1098/rsos.250691. eCollection 2025 Jul.
Studies on single species often support that social instability influences physiological stress responses and individual fitness within social groups, yet the underlying mechanisms and adaptive consequences remain unclear. We conducted a meta-analysis spanning from 1970 to 2025, incorporating data from 59 articles across avian and mammalian species, to investigate the effects of social instability on stress and fitness. We found a positive association between social instability and glucocorticoid levels, consistent with our expectation of physiological response. Fitness declined with increasing social instability, but this relationship was not statistically significant and did not support our expectations. We found no statistically significant moderating effects of social system component, sex, age, taxonomic group and study type (experimental versus observational) on either stress or fitness outcomes. However, females and adults exhibited stronger positive stress correlations and stronger negative fitness correlations, and observational studies showed a similar trend when compared with experimental studies. Our results highlight a significant gap in the literature and call for greater taxonomic diversity and increasing use of experimental field studies to better understand the effects of social instability. Our meta-analysis further stresses the need for improved study standardization, as less than 20% of the publications examined were suitable for analysis.
对单一物种的研究通常支持这样的观点，即社会不稳定会影响社会群体内的生理应激反应和个体健康状况，但其潜在机制和适应性后果仍不清楚。我们进行了一项从1970年至2025年的荟萃分析，纳入了来自59篇涉及鸟类和哺乳动物物种文章的数据，以研究社会不稳定对压力和健康状况的影响。我们发现社会不稳定与糖皮质激素水平之间存在正相关，这与我们对生理反应的预期一致。随着社会不稳定程度的增加，健康状况下降，但这种关系在统计学上并不显著，也不支持我们的预期。我们发现社会系统组成部分、性别、年龄、分类群和研究类型（实验性与观察性）对压力或健康状况结果均无统计学上的显著调节作用。然而，雌性和成年个体表现出更强的正向压力相关性和更强的负向健康相关性，并且与实验性研究相比，观察性研究也呈现出类似的趋势。我们的研究结果凸显了文献中的一个重大差距，并呼吁提高分类多样性以及增加实验性实地研究的使用，以更好地理解社会不稳定的影响。我们的荟萃分析进一步强调了改进研究标准化的必要性，因为所审查的出版物中只有不到20%适合进行分析。
