Jessica R Deere, Kathryn L Schaber, Steffen Foerster, Ian C Gilby, Joseph T Feldblum, Kimberly VanderWaal, Tiffany M Wolf, Dominic A Travis, Jane Raphael, Iddi Lipende, Deus Mjungu, Anne E Pusey, Elizabeth V Lonsdorf, Thomas R Gillespie
Increased risk of pathogen transmission through proximity and contact is a well-documented cost of sociality. Affiliative social contact, however, is an integral part of primate group life and can benefit health. Despite its importance to the evolution and maintenance of sociality, the tradeoff between costs and benefits of social contact for group-living primate species remains poorly understood. To improve our understanding of this interplay, we used social network analysis to investigate whether contact via association in the same space and/or physical contact measured through grooming were associated with helminth parasite species richness in a community of wild chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii )...
May 2021: Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology