Biology subjects

Motes-Rodrigo, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Motes-Rodrigo, A..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Quantifying direct and indirect maternal effects on male vervets rank post-dispersal

Early life experiences have important fitness consequences across animals, with maternal environments playing a crucial role in some species survival and reproduction during adulthood. A potential pathway linking maternal behaviour with individual fitness is dominance rank, which in some primates - like cercopithecines - is maternally inherited during the juvenile period and strongly linked to individual social behaviour and reproductive success. While females of these species maintain their rank for life in their natal group, males disperse and must integrate into new dominance hierarchies. In this context, the long-term effects of maternal characteristics on male rank post-dispersal and the potential of males social behaviour in mediating this relationship remains unexplored. Using 16 years of data from a wild vervet monkey population (Chlorocebus pygerythrus), we tested the effects of maternal rank, grooming and proximity on the rank males acquired their first year post-dispersal. In addition, we measured the extent to which the males own social behaviour both pre- and post-dispersal mediate this relationship combining Bayesian social networks with mediation analyses. We did not find support for a mediating effect of males social behaviour on the relationship between maternal characteristics and male rank post-dispersal. Instead, we found that maternal characteristics influence males social behaviour during the juvenile period and that males own social behaviour post-dispersal (grooming out-degree) is related to their rank when they integrate into a new group. In addition, we found that consistency in males social behaviour pre- to post-dispersal is restricted to grooming behaviour, highlighting the different roles of proximity and grooming relationships in vervet societies. Taken together these results reveal very limited long-term effects of maternal characteristics on male behaviour during the heavily underexplored process of dispersal and the flexibility of male vervet social behaviour following a change in social environment.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2026

Which senses do wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) use for evaluating potential food items?

Traditionally, primates have been considered primarily visual animals. However, studies across a variety of taxa suggest that, in the context of food evaluation, the reliance on this sense might be more nuanced that previously thought, with dietary specialization and food item properties leading to differences in sensory prioritization. We performed a field-based study assessing the use of sensory cues during food evaluation as well as food-related behaviours such as muzzle contact in two mixed-sex groups of wild vervet monkeys including three age classes over a period of five months (nmonkeys = 44). Using a total of 18868 food evaluation observations collected over 44 hours of focal follows, we found that vervets mainly relied on their sense of vision when evaluating food (96.8% of all instances). Sensory usage varied according to food category and sex differences were only observed in the use of smell for a subset of these. Juveniles initiated muzzle contact and used tactile inspection more often than adults whereas females received muzzle contact more often than males. In addition, the low rejection rates suggest that most food items were familiar to the vervets regardless of age and sex. These findings are in line with optimal foraging theory according to which the food evaluation process should be adapted to the familiarity of food items and allows individuals to maximize their intake of energy and critical nutrients, while minimizing the time and effort in food evaluation.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2023

Social responses to a hurricane drive greater epidemic risk

Climate change is intensifying extreme weather events, with severe implications for ecosystem dynamics. A key behavioural mechanism whereby animals may cope with such events is by increasing social cohesion to improve access to scarce resources like refuges, which in turn could exacerbate epidemic risk due to increased close contact. However, how and to what extent natural disasters affect disease risk via changes in sociality remains unexplored in animal populations. By modelling disease spread in free-living rhesus macaque groups (Macaca mulatta) before and after a hurricane, we demonstrate doubled pathogen transmission rates up to five years following the disaster, equivalent to an increase in pathogen infectivity from 10% to 20%. Moreover, the hurricane redistributed the risk of infection across the population, decreasing status-related differences found in pre-hurricane years. These findings demonstrate that natural disasters can exacerbate and homogenise epidemic risk in an animal population via changes in sociality. These observations provide unexpected further mechanisms by which extreme weather events can threaten wildlife health, population viability, and spillover to humans.

ecology↗