Which types of social relationships matter? Affiliative bonds and mortality risk in wild primates.
Institute Seminar by Fernando Campos
- Date: Apr 23, 2024
- Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Fernando Campos
- My research aims to understand how social and ecological experiences that accumulate across the life course are linked to individual differences in behavior, health, survival, and fertility. I use noninvasive field, lab, and computational methods to investigate these topics through the long-term study of wild nonhuman primates. I have worked with a variety of different wild primate populations, and I codirect the Santa Rosa Capuchin Project, a long-term research program focusing on white-faced capuchin monkeys in northwestern Costa Rica. I have a B.S in Biology from Caltech, M.A. and PhD degrees in Anthropology from the University of Calgary, and I did a postdoc at Duke University. I am currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of San Antonio, Texas.
- Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
- Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
- Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
- Contact: ukalbitzer@ab.mpg.de
In humans, having stronger, more numerous, or more supportive social relationships predicts mortality risk from almost every cause of death—a pattern that cuts across cultural, geographic, gender, and socioeconomic lines. Recent studies from a wide range of wild mammals show startling converge with the human literature: more socially connected individuals typically experience improved health and reduced mortality risk throughout adulthood. Yet clear explanations for such patterns in animals remain elusive, and empirical studies often find disparate aspects of social relationships to be most predictive of survival, even within single populations. I will discuss my work on understanding these links, focusing on adult survival in nonhuman primates, and drawing on data from long-term field research on wild baboons and capuchins. I will also discuss patterns of age-related variation in different aspects of affiliative social relationships throughout the natural aging process in primates.
The MPI-AB Seminar Series is open to members of MPI and Uni Konstanz. The zoom link is published each week in the MPI-AB newsletter.