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1. Anthropometric heritability and child growth in a Caribbean village: A quantitative genetic analysis of longitudinal height, weight, and body mass index in Bwa Mawego, Dominica

   https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23924  

   Keith, Monica H. ; Blomquist, Gregory E. ; Flinn, Mark V. ( August 2019 , American Journal of Physical Anthropology)

   Body size and composition vary widely among individuals and populations, and long‐term research in diverse contexts informs our understanding of genetic, cultural, and environmental impacts on this variation. We analyze longitudinal measures of height, weight, and body mass index (BMI) from a Caribbean village, estimating the extent to which these anthropometrics are shaped by genetic variance in a small‐scale population of mixed ancestry.

   Longitudinal data from a traditionally horticultural village in Dominica document height and weight in a non‐Western population that is transitioning to increasingly Westernized lifestyles, and an 11‐generation pedigree enables us to estimate the proportions of phenotypic variation in height, weight, and BMI attributed to genetic variation. We assess within‐individual variation across growth curves as well as heritabilities of these traits for 260 individuals using Bayesian variance component estimation.

   Age, sex, and secular trends account for the majority of anthropometric variation in these longitudinal data. Independent of age, sex, and secular trends, our analyses show high repeatabilities for the remaining variation in height, weight, and BMI growth curves (>0.75), and moderate heritabilities (h²_height= 0.68,h²_weight= 0.64,h²_BMI= 0.49) reveal clear genetic signals that account for large proportions of the variation in body size observed between families. Secular trends show increases of 6.5% in height and 16.0% in weight from 1997 to 2017.

   This horticultural Caribbean population has transitioned to include more Westernized foods and technologies over the decades captured in this analysis. BMI varies widely between individuals and is significantly shaped by genetic variation, warranting future exploration with other physiological correlates and associated genetic variants.

    

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2. Heritability of interpack aggression in a wild pedigreed population of North American grey wolves

   https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.15349  

   vonHoldt, Bridgett M. ; DeCandia, Alexandra L. ; Heppenheimer, Elizabeth ; Janowitz‐Koch, Ilana ; Shi, Ruoyao ; Zhou, Hua ; German, Christopher A. ; Brzeski, Kristin E. ; Cassidy, Kira A. ; Stahler, Daniel R. ; et al ( January 2020 , Molecular Ecology)

   Aggression is a quantitative trait deeply entwined with individual fitness. Mapping the genomic architecture underlying such traits is complicated by complex inheritance patterns, social structure, pedigree information and gene pleiotropy. Here, we leveraged the pedigree of a reintroduced population of grey wolves (Canis lupus) in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA, to examine the heritability of and the genetic variation associated with aggression. Since their reintroduction, many ecological and behavioural aspects have been documented, providing unmatched records of aggressive behaviour across multiple generations of a wild population of wolves. Using a linear mixed model, a robust genetic relationship matrix, 12,288 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and 111 wolves, we estimated the SNP‐based heritability of aggression to be 37% and an additional 14% of the phenotypic variation explained by shared environmental exposures. We identified 598 SNP genotypes from 425 grey wolves to resolve a consensus pedigree that was included in a heritability analysis of 141 individuals with SNP genotype, metadata and aggression data. The pedigree‐based heritability estimate for aggression is 14%, and an additional 16% of the phenotypic variation was explained by shared environmental exposures. We find strong effects of breeding status and relative pack size on aggression. Through an integrative approach, these results provide a framework for understanding the genetic architecture of a complex trait that influences individual fitness, with linkages to reproduction, in a social carnivore. Along with a few other studies, we show here the incredible utility of a pedigreed natural population for dissecting a complex, fitness‐related behavioural trait.

    

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3. Mother of all bonds: Influences on spatial association across the lifespan in capuchins

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13486  

   Godoy, Irene ; Korsten, Peter ; Perry, Susan E. ( February 2024 , Developmental Science)

   In humans, being more socially integrated is associated with better physical and mental health and/or with lower mortality. This link between sociality and health may have ancient roots: sociality also predicts survival or reproduction in other mammals, such as rats, dolphins, and non‐human primates. A key question, therefore, is which factors influence the degree of sociality over the life course. Longitudinal data can provide valuable insight into how environmental variability drives individual differences in sociality and associated outcomes. The first year of life—when long‐lived mammals are the most reliant on others for nourishment and protection—is likely to play an important role in how individuals learn to integrate into groups. Using behavioral, demographic, and pedigree information on 376 wild capuchin monkeys (Cebus imitator) across 20 years, we address how changes in group composition influence spatial association. We further try to determine the extent to which early maternal social environments have downstream effects on sociality across the juvenile and (sub)adult stages. We find a positive effect of early maternal spatial association, where female infants whose mothers spent more time around others also later spent more time around others as juveniles and subadults. Our results also highlight the importance of kin availability and other aspects of group composition (e.g., group size) in dynamically influencing spatial association across developmental stages. We bring attention to the importance of—and difficulty in—determining the social versus genetic influences that parents have on offspring phenotypes.

   Having more maternal kin (mother and siblings) is associated with spending more time near others across developmental stages in both male and female capuchins.

   Having more offspring as a subadult or adult female is additionally associated with spending more time near others.

   A mother's average sociality (time near others) is predictive of how social her daughters (but not sons) become as juveniles and subadults (a between‐mother effect).

   Additional variation within sibling sets in this same maternal phenotype is not predictive of how social they become later relative to each other (no within‐mother effect).

    

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4. Timing of seasonal events is correlated with social network position in a wild mammal

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-024-03472-5  

   Philson, Conner_S ; Bruebach, Carla ; Bastian, Taylor ; Barr, Billy ; Blumstein, Daniel_T ( May 2024 , Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology)

   Across animal systems, abiotic environmental features, including timing of seasonal events and weather patterns, affect fitness. An individual’s degree of social integration also has fitness consequences, but we lack an understanding of how abiotic features relate to patterns of individual sociality. A deeper understanding of this relationship could be developed from studying systems where these two links with fitness have already been identified. We explored the relationship between individual social behavior and seasonal timing, seasonal length, and weather patterns. We used social network analysis on a sixteen-year dataset of a wild population of hibernating yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer). We fit a series of generalized linear mixed models and found that longer growing seasons before winter hibernation and longer winters were associated with increased individual sociality in the following spring. However, later snowmelt was associated with decreased sociality that spring. We found no relationship between individual sociality and various measures of precipitation and temperature. This suggests that seasonal timing and length may be a more important driver of sociality than weather patterns in this system, both as a lag and contemporary effect. Seasonal timing and length may mediate the opportunity or intensity of social interactions. The entwined relationships between the seasonal schedule and weather, and the seemingly contradictory role of winter length and snowmelt, suggests the timing of seasons and its relationship with sociality is complex and further exploration of environment-sociality relationships is required across taxa.

   While the adaptive benefits of social behavior are well studied, less is known about how features of the abiotic environment drive variation in individual social behavior. Given increasing stochasticity in the timing of seasonal events and weather patterns, mapping the environment-sociality relationship will provide important insights to the drivers of sociality in the wild. This is particularly salient for species most vulnerable to climate and environmental change, such as seasonal hibernators, like yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer). We found that features of seasonal duration were positively associated with increased sociality, whereas the timing of seasonal onset was negatively associated. This work provides empirical evidence towards an important gap in the behavioral ecology literature.

    

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5. A trait‐based approach to predict population genetic structure in bees

   https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.15028  

   López‐Uribe, Margarita M. ; Jha, Shalene ; Soro, Antonella ( April 2019 , Molecular Ecology)

   Understanding population genetic structure is key to developing predictions about species susceptibility to environmental change, such as habitat fragmentation and climate change. It has been theorized that life‐history traits may constrain some species in their dispersal and lead to greater signatures of population genetic structure. In this study, we use a quantitative comparative approach to assess if patterns of population genetic structure in bees are driven by three key species‐level life‐history traits: body size, sociality, and diet breadth. Specifically, we reviewed the current literature on bee population genetic structure, as measured by the differentiation indices Nei'sG_ST,Hedrick'sG′_ST, and Jost'sD. We then used phylogenetic generalised linear models to estimate the correlation between the evolution of these traits and patterns of genetic differentiation. Our analyses revealed a negative and significant effect of body size on genetic structure, regardless of differentiation index utilized. For Hedrick'sG′_STand Jost'sD, we also found a significant impact of sociality, where social species exhibited lower levels of differentiation than solitary species. We did not find an effect of diet specialization on population genetic structure. Overall, our results suggest that physical dispersal or other functions related to body size are among the most critical for mediating population structure for bees. We further highlight the importance of standardizing population genetic measures to more easily compare studies and to identify the most susceptible species to landscape and climatic changes.

    

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