A healthy social life? Sociality and health indicators in wild red-fronted lemurs

by Charlotte Defolie
Doctoral thesis
Date of Examination:2020-07-03
Date of issue:2022-06-29
Advisor:Dr. Claudia Fichtel
Referee:Dr. Claudia Fichtel
Referee:Prof. Dr. Julia Ostner
Persistent Address: http://dx.doi.org/10.53846/goediss-9328

 

 

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Abstract

English

In the last 40 years, an increasing number of studies from medicine, neurosciences, and psychology demonstrated links between many aspects of sociality, health, and fitness in humans and laboratory animals. Some studies highlighted strong detrimental effects of social isolation and competition, while others showed powerful benefits of strong or diverse relationships on longevity, reproductive success, and susceptibility to diseases. However, most of these findings derived from captive studies or the medical sciences, whereas few studies took place in natural conditions under which the mechanisms driving these effects evolved. Furthermore, results appear sometimes equivocal and the directionality of the sociality-health-fitness relationship remains unclear. As a consequence, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying this link and how it evolved is still limited. Redfronted lemurs (Eulemur rufifrons) are particularly of interest to investigate the sociality-health relationship due to their social organisation with a non-linear dominance, and social tolerance but frequent social instability. We studied a wild population of redfronted lemurs in Kirindy Forest, western Madagascar for 18 months to determine the relative importance of social factors on the transmission of and susceptibility to parasites and determine the relative importance of physiological stress variations as a mediator of these effects.
Keywords: primates; sociality; health; stress; glucocorticoids; parasites; lemurs; inflammation; CRP; non-invasive health assessment; seasonality; self-medication
 
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