Early-life influences on the development of cooperation in wild mammals

Cooperative animal societies, in which adults help to rear offspring that are not their own, have been the focus of intense research because they can help to understand how cooperation can evolve in the face of natural selection for self-interest. However, this research has also revealed great unexplained variation between individuals in how much they contribute to teamwork and how much effort they invest in rearing offspring. A plausible explanation for this variation comes from research on laboratory animals showing that early life conditions have lifelong impacts on adult health and behaviour, suggesting that differences in helping effort among adults could be attributable to variation in their early life developmental experiences and nutrition. Our research will test this hypothesis using our long-term habituated study population of banded mongooses, a highly cooperative mammal which lives in mixed-sex groups of around twenty individuals throughout sub-Saharan Africa. This species is ideal for the task because there is extreme variation among individual group members in how much they contribute to raising communal litters of offspring, and extreme variation among offspring in how much care and food they receive from adults. We have built up a detailed database on the behaviour and reproductive success of over 2200 individuals which enables us to test the lifetime consequences of this variation in early life care, and we can carry out feeding experiments to test whether maternal nutrition during pregnancy has lifelong impacts on their offspring. We will also measure the underlying hormonal mechanisms which control cooperative behaviour, and test how sensitive these hormonal mechanisms are to early life experiences and maternal nutrition in utero. The output of the research will be an improved understanding of the causes of individual variation in cooperative behaviour, and improved knowledge of mammalian development in populations exposed to natural predators and pathogens.

The British public has an extremely strong standing interest in natural history, a cultural tradition that has undoubtedly contributed to the extraordinary contributions to biology made by UK science. Our previous work on this species has capitalised on this interest and generated a great deal of media attention, resulting in a prime-time BBC2 TV Series which attracted an audience of over 1.5 million in the UK, and over 20 million worldwide. At the time of writing the BBC are planning to revisit the study population at the end of 2011/2012 for follow up filming; and we are negotiating with a second media production company about a 3D feature film on the mongooses. The PI will build on his existing contacts with the BBC and other media companies to take full advantage of the charismatic nature of the study species and the opportunities or educational outreach that it presents. The proposed research project focuses on a question which is also of inherent interest to the public - how early life experiences affect behaviour, stress, and health in later life providing opportunities to reach a very broad audience to communicate the value of contemporary scientific research on animals in their natural environment, and the value of the natural environment itself. It is not possible to guarantee media contracts at this stage of the application, but based on our past experience we are confident that the proposed research will lead to considerable TV, print and online media coverage. Outreach will be further aided by the technical upgrade to our existing website www.bandedmongoose.org.
A second group of beneficiaries are conservation and wildlife managers aiming to predict the individual, group, and population responses of cooperative mammals to changes in resource availability and climate. Many iconic and conservation priority species (e.g. lions, African wild dogs, Ethiopian wolves, callitrichid primates) are facultative cooperative breeders in which there exist minimum viable group sizes for successful reproduction. These species are inherently susceptible to destabilizing population dynamic forces (e.g. Allee effects) which have been explored theoretically but about which there is little information from wild systems. The proposed research will help to reveal the short and long-term effects of supplementary feeding for levels of cooperation and group productivity, which may help guide intervention for rarer, more elusive cooperatively breeding mammals that are much harder to study. Although population dynamics is not a focus of the current research, we see our results as having potential future impact by laying the groundwork for follow-up research on population responses arising from developmental responses to nutritional stress or the quality of cooperative rearing environments.
Finally, our research will have an impact in raising awareness about the value of the natural environment locally in Uganda, and more broadly among international tourist visitors to Queen Elizabeth National Park. We will set up an 'Experiential Tourism' project whereby tourists will spend a morning out with the mongooses accompanied by Park Rangers, with proceeds going to UWA and its efforts at conservation in Uganda. We will also visit local schools thrice-yearly to give seminars and to raise awareness about the intrinsic value of biodiversity and wildlife in Uganda's protected areas. This is a critically important component of the study because there is very high levels of human-wildlife conflict in QENP.