the price of play self-organized infant mortality cycles in chimpanzees的价格在黑猩猩中发挥自组织婴儿死亡率周期.pdfVIP

The Price of Play: Self-Organized Infant Mortality Cycles in Chimpanzees Hjalmar S. Kuehl*, Caroline Elzner, Yasmin Moebius, Christophe Boesch, Peter D. Walsh Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany Abstract Chimpanzees have been used extensively as a model system for laboratory research on infectious diseases. Ironically, we know next to nothing about disease dynamics in wild chimpanzee populations. Here, we analyze long-term demographic ¨ ˆ and behavioral data from two habituated chimpanzee communities in Taı National Park, Cote d’Ivoire, where previous work has shown respiratory pathogens to be an important source of infant mortality. In this paper we trace the effect of social connectivity on infant mortality dynamics. We focus on social play which, as the primary context of contact between young ¨ chimpanzees, may serve as a key venue for pathogen transmission. Infant abundance and mortality rates at Taı cycled regularly and in a way that was not well explained in terms of environmental forcing. Rather, infant mortality cycles appeared to self-organize in response to the ontogeny of social play. Each cycle started when the death of multiple infants in an outbreak synchronized the reproductive cycles of their mothers. A pulse of births predictably arrived about twelve months later, with social connectivity increasing over the following two years as the large birth cohort approached the peak of social play. The high social connectivity at this play peak then appeared to facilitate further outbreaks. Our results provide the first evidence that social play ha