social evolution

First author of the current paper is Matthew Zipple, a neurobiologist at Cornell University's Laboratory for Animal Social Evolution and Recognition.

Baptiste Sadoughi, first author of the study and former PhD student in the Social Evolution in Primates Group at the German Primate Center turned to long-term social data on female Assamese macaques collected at the DPZ field site at Phu Khieo Wildlife Sanctuary to test the drivers of social aging in non-human primate species that lack a human-like sense of mortality.

"With age comes a greater risk of death. With poor social integration and fewer partners close by comes a greater risk of death, especially under natural predation pressure. This simple fact means that changes in social integration with age are partially confounded by the greater likelihood that individuals who reach old age will be exceptionally well-connected socially, because the less well-connected have already died, a phenomenon called selective disappearance," explains Prof. Julia Ostner, head of the Social Evolution in Primates Group and senior author of the study.

A research group led by Dervis Can Vural, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Notre Dame, explored how the social evolution of microbes can be manipulated by tuning the physical parameters of the environment in which they live.

The study is the latest research from Vural on the potential of engineering social evolution in microfluidic environments.