Social behaviour, health and ageing in wild vertebrate populations

Sociality is widely recognised as an important aspect of health in humans and throughout the animal kingdom and plays a fundamental role in ecological and evolutionary processes (Walter and O'Mahony, 2019). How social behaviour impacts
health and survival, along with how these social effects on fitness may change over an individuals' lifetime, is the primary focus of this project. Social behaviour has benefits such as information transfer and social learning but also costs such as resource sharing and disease transfer (Macdonald, 1983). This project aims to understand the factors influencing how and why social networks form in wild animal systems. More specifically an investigation of social inheritance may explain the structure of animal social networks, whereby, in species with prolonged maternal care offspring networks develop through the formation of bonds to maternal contacts (Ilany et al., 2021; Ilany and Akçay, 2016). After developing a better understanding of social network formation, this project will then consider how social behaviour may impact health, particularly through an animal's gut parasites and commensal bacteria. In many animal species, gut bacteria are spread through social contact (Sarkar et al., 2020). Therefore, inheritance of social bonds from a parent may help stabilise microbiota communities by maintaining the transmission of socially spread gut bacteria (Firth and Sheldon, 2021). However, social contacts spread parasites meaning there is also a detrimental effect of sociality(Stockmaier et al., 2023). This project will investigate how individuals embedded within complex social systems maximise the benefits of sociality while minimising the costs.