Publications by authors named "Emilio Macanas-Martinez"
Parasite infection is one key risk inherent in group living and is considered to influence the formation and evolution of animal societies. Previous studies investigating the relationship between sociability (a measure of an individual's level of social engagement) and parasite infection have yielded mixed results, with some observing positive relationships between social network centrality and infection and others observing negative or no sociability-infection links. Here, we aggregated behavioral and parasitological data from three groups of rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta brevicaudus) in China and two groups of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata and Macaca fuscata yakui) to test whether sociability generally predicts geohelminth infection in macaques with similar social structure.
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- Group living can benefit individuals, but it also increases the risk of pathogen transmission due to more social contacts that lead to higher parasite abundance.
- The study focused on Japanese macaques to explore how social network centrality (connections and interactions) relates to gastrointestinal helminth infection intensity measured by egg counts in feces.
- The results indicated that while network centrality correlated with infection intensity at the whole group level, this correlation weakened and lost statistical significance when only subsets of the group were analyzed, suggesting that excluding parts of the population affects overall findings.
Article Synopsis
- * In three experiments, these macaques reacted to human gaze in different contexts (threat, cooperation, competition), showing varied behaviors based on the situation.
- * The findings suggest that macaques interpret human gaze contextually; they perceive direct gaze as threatening and respond to cooperative cues but appear unable to consider the perspective of a competitor.