Find research datasets worth reusing

opencc-zeroSep 2020View details →

Data from: Crop pollination services: complementary resource use by social vs solitary bees facing crops with contrasting flower supply

1. Many farmers are facing high economic risks if pollinator declines continue or temporal and spatial variation in wild bee communities cause reduced pollination services. Co-flowering crops might compete for pollinators, while they also might facilitate the delivery of pollination services. This rarely studied topic is of particular interest with respect to the foraging decisions of bees from different functional groups and when more sparsely and mass-flowering crops are in bloom at the same time. 2. The abundance of honey bees, bumble bees and solitary bees in strawberry fields was quantified with transect walks along a gradient of oilseed rape (OSR) availability (product of OSR land cover and temporally changing OSR flower cover). We established a pollination experiment with pollination treatments (open-, wind- and self-pollination) to study the effects of insect pollination on strawberry fruit weight and quality. 3. Changes in OSR availability exhibited contrasting effects on social versus solitary bees in strawberry fields. Bumble bees and honey bees were less abundant in strawberry fields when OSR availability was high, whereas solitary bees were facilitated. With more strawberry flowers we found more bees in general. 4. When flowers were open-pollinated they resulted in heavier fruits with better commercial grades compared to wind-and self-pollinated flowers. A higher bee abundance enhanced the strawberry fruit weight and quality but depended on flower order and variety. 5. Synthesis and applications. Sparsely flowering crops may compete with mass-flowering crops for social bee pollinators while solitary pollinators in the field might be even facilitated. To ensure best fruit weight and quality it can be beneficial to support bee abundance in the field. While some social and solitary bee species can be managed for pollination services, wild bees, in particular solitary species, should be conserved and promoted for stable crop pollination services in dynamic agricultural landscapes.

opencc-by-4.0Oct 2020View details →

Joint Autoregressive and Graph Models for Software and Developer Social Networks

This zip contains three CSV files and one folder. This dataset contains information for the recent ten distributions. <ul> <li>developer_attributes.csv: There are seven columns in this file.  "distro" (str) represents distribution name. "source" (str) denotes source package name. "person_id" (str) indicates developer identity. "closes" (int), "high" (int),  "medium" (int), "low" (int) are the features.</li> <li>source_bugs.csv: In this file, three columns are present. "distro" (str) represents the distribution name. "source" (str) represents the source package name. "bug_count" (int) denotes the number of bugs that source package has at a particular distribution.</li> <li>source_sizes.csv: In this file, three columns are present. "distro" (str) represents the distribution name. "source" (str) represents source package name. "size" (int) denotes the size of the package.</li> <li>Dependency folder: Within this folder, ten dependency lists are present. Each file contains two columns i.e "start" (str) and "target" (str). Both of them represent source packages. So, we read as the "start" source package depends on "target" source package. </li> </ul> Here is the arxiv version of our paper: <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.08729">https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.08729</a>.  Here is the portal link: <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/rima-hazra/swnet">https://sites.google.com/view/rima-hazra/swnet</a>

opencc-zeroOct 2020View details →

Data from: Temporal dynamics of competitive fertilization in social groups of red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) shed new light on avian sperm competition

Studies of birds have made a fundamental contribution to elucidating sperm competition processes, experimentally demonstrating the role of individual mechanisms in competitive fertilisation. However, the relative importance of these mechanisms and the way in which they interact under natural conditions remain largely unexplored. Here, we conduct a detailed behavioural study of freely-mating replicate groups of red junglefowl, Gallus gallus, to predict the probability that competing males fertilise individual eggs over the course of 10-day trials. Remating frequently with a female and mating last increased a male's probability of fertilisation, but only for eggs ovulated in the last days of a trial. Conversely, older males, and those mating with more polyandrous females, had consistently lower fertilisation success. Similarly, resistance to a male's mating attempts, particularly by younger females, reduced fertilisation probability. After considering these factors, male social status, partner relatedness and the estimated state of a male extragonadal sperm reserves did not predict sperm competition outcomes. These results shed new light on sperm competition dynamics in taxa such as birds, with prolonged female sperm storage and staggered fertilisations.

opencc-by-4.0Nov 2020View details →

Familiist (pro-natalist) communities in the social network VKontakte

The database contains an upload of text comments in Russian from the social networkVkontakte in .csv format (UTF-8 encoding). Comments are collected from communities, which discuss pregnancy, childhood, motherhood, paternity, etc. The unloading contains comments under the posts with which the interaction took place. The absolute amount of likes was used as a criterion, (comments were collected where the number of likes is greater than or equal to 5). The text data was processed (stemmization and lemmatization). The data are suitable for thematic analysis (e.g. LDA - Latent Dirichlet Allocation), for modelling the graph structure of communities (the link_comment variable contains a unique identifier of the post, link_author contains a unique user identifier), for analysis of the tonalities of statements and forming a dictionary of demographic connotation.  Sample Information: - Number of communities 38  - Content type of communities: communities in which users are mainly positive about the birth of children, motherhood, parenthood and own family are selected. But users (communities) with anti-familistic biases may be encountered.     - Only comments with the number of likes >= 5 are collected  - Comments are collected only from communities (the list of communities below) discussing issues related to childhood, motherhood, pregnancy, etc.  - A sample of communities on average contains 309 thousand subscribers (maximum value - 1,482,303, minimum value - 72,570, total number of subscribers excluding intersections - 11,743 295)  - The sample of comments contains 112,900 user comments  Sample Structure:  link_author - link to the author of the comment in the form of https://vk.com/*author identificator*  gender of author (F - female, M - male, NaN - no data)  link_comment - link to comment in the form of https://vk.com/* post identificatior on a *community wall*?reply=*comment id *  date_time - date and time of publication (format “YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS”)  text - raw comment text  likes - number of likes the comment has  text_prep - processed text (punctuation marks removed, words brought down to lowercase)  text_stem - processed text (based on the text_prep column stemmization using SnowBallstemmer (“Russian”) of the nltk library) is performed  text_sw - processed text (based on the text_prep column stop words are deleted using word_tokenize (text) of the nltk library)  text_lemm - processed text (lemmatization using mystem.lemmatize (text) of pymystem3 library is performed based on the text_prep column)  List of communities (38 communities): https://vk.com/club52388302 https://vk.com/club34677924 https://vk.com/club99834596 https://vk.com/club170234932 https://vk.com/club20199180 https://vk.com/club118030893 https://vk.com/club14395935 https://vk.com/club100104267 https://vk.com/club181526404 https://vk.com/club35095382 https://vk.com/club58530763 https://vk.com/club69716165 https://vk.com/club29746763 https://vk.com/club78865067 https://vk.com/club20709572 https://vk.com/club93466205 https://vk.com/club61700163 https://vk.com/club91423062 https://vk.com/club69285929 https://vk.com/club104012302 https://vk.com/club20622108 https://vk.com/club86333616 https://vk.com/club24765 https://vk.com/club87169444 https://vk.com/club86688308 https://vk.com/club93776129 https://vk.com/club47207301 https://vk.com/club39873171 https://vk.com/club59224150 https://vk.com/club7430494 https://vk.com/club37739956 https://vk.com/club59701255 https://vk.com/club27427277 https://vk.com/club126238531 https://vk.com/club127678644 https://vk.com/club57782234 https://vk.com/club51314884 https://vk.com/club134261249

opencc-zeroNov 2020View details →

Data for: Infectious disease and sickness behaviour: tumour progression affects interaction patterns and social network structure in wild Tasmanian devils

Infectious diseases, including transmissible cancers, can have a broad range of impacts on host behaviour, particularly in the latter stages of disease progression. However, the difficulty of early diagnoses makes the study of behavioural influences of disease in wild animals a challenging task. Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) are affected by a transmissible cancer, devil facial tumour disease (DFTD), in which tumours are externally visible as they progress. Using telemetry and mark-recapture data sets, we quantify the impacts of cancer progression on the behaviour of wild devils by assessing how interaction patterns within the social network of a population change with increasing tumour load. DFTD negatively influences devils' likelihood of interaction within their network, an effect which increases with increasing tumour load. Infected devils were more active within their network late in the mating season, a pattern with repercussions for DFTD transmission. Our study provides a rare opportunity to quantify and understand the behavioural feedbacks of disease in wildlife and how they may affect transmission and population dynamics in general.

opencc-zeroNov 2020View details →

Gregariousness, foraging effort, and social interactions in lactating bonobos and chimpanzees

Fission-fusion dynamics have evolved in a broad range of animal taxa and are thought to allow individuals to mitigate feeding competition. While this is the principal benefit of fission-fusion, few studies have evaluated its costs. We compared gregariousness, foraging budgets, and social budgets between lactating bonobos and chimpanzees from wild populations to evaluate such costs. Both species exhibit fission-fusion dynamics, but chimpanzees, particularly in East African populations, appear to experience higher feeding competition than bonobos. We expected lactating chimpanzees to be less gregarious than lactating bonobos; reduced gregariousness should allow lactating chimpanzees to mitigate costs of higher feeding competition without requiring more foraging effort. However, we expected the reduced gregariousness of lactating chimpanzees to limit their time available for affiliative social interactions. Using long-term data from LuiKotale bonobos and Gombe chimpanzees, we found that lactating chimpanzees were indeed less gregarious than lactating bonobos while feeding and travel time did not differ between species. Contrary to our predictions, lactating females did not differ in social interaction time, and lactating chimpanzees spent proportionately more time interacting with individuals other than their immature offspring. Our results indicate that lactating chimpanzees can maintain social budgets comparable to lactating bonobos despite reduced gregariousness and without incurring additional foraging costs. We discuss potential explanations for why lactating bonobos are more gregarious.

opencc-by-4.0Nov 2020View details →

Utilizing Social Media for Identifying Drug Addiction and Recovery Intervention

This dataset is for the paper "Utilizing Social Media for Identifying Drug Addiction and Recovery Intervention" published in Data Analytics for Smart Health (DASH) workshop (<a href="https://sites.google.com/view/ieee-dash-2020">https://sites.google.com/view/ieee-dash-2020</a>) co-located with the IEEE BigData 2020 conference. Overview of the Paper Topic-specific social media forums such as Reddit have become popular platforms for users discussing health-related information as well as for scientific analysis of that information. Such discussions among users have been found to be effective in providing useful insights and assistance in many healthcare applications. This study focuses on one such application, where we utilize Reddit posts related to drug addiction/substance abuse, in order to help the addicted persons. We observe some linguistic differences in the posts as users gradually move from the addicted stage to more and more advanced recovery stages. We then classify user-posts on Reddit as to be indicative of drug addiction or of different stages of recovery of the user.  By annotating Reddit posts with the help of standard social and health psychology literature, we develop a Machine Learning classifier based on linguistic features, to classify the posts among different classes related to addiction and recovery. Finally, we identify users having an intention to recover and perform a personalized mentor recommendation by referring them to users who are already in their advanced stage of recovery based on the usage of drugs. To our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to utilize social media for helping addicted users having the intention to recover with personalized mentor recommendations to facilitate their process of recovery. Overview of the dataset  The dataset contains posts from drug addiction-related Subreddits which are topic-specific communities within the Reddit OSM (Online Social Media). We considered 100 distinct Subreddits related to drug addiction and recovery, which are listed in the Wiki page of the Subreddit `Drugs' (<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/wiki/subreddits">https://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/wiki/subreddits</a>). We annotated 3151 posts out of all the posts collected as one of the 5 classes: 'Addicted', ' E(early)-Recovery',  ' M(maintaining)-Recovery',  ' A(advanced)-Recovery', 'Others'.  The dataset has the following 8 fields,  * id: A unique identifier for each post * username: The username for each post * title: Each post is associated with a title * body: The main descriptive part of the post is identified by its 'body' * #comments: This field represents the number of comments the post has received * score: This field represents the number of upvotes received by each post * label_classification: The label given to a post for the classification task (one of the 5 classes stated above) * label_recommendation: The label given to a post for the recommendation task where the 'Addicted' class of classification task was further divided into 'Addicted with intention to recover', and 'Addicted without intention to recover' Note that the dataset has been anonymized by replacing all personally identifiable information (PII) such as usernames, email-ids, phone numbers, SSNs, etc. by using the tool available at <a href="https://github.com/mns-llc/bitsnarf">https://github.com/mns-llc/bitsnarf</a>  as well as using some standard dictionary-based methods.

opennotspecifiedNov 2020View details →

FIGURE 1 in Ontogeny of an arlequin: morphological and colour pattern changes from juvenile to adult in Gnathophyllum elegans (Risso, 1816) (Decapoda: Palaemonidae), traced through citizen science and social media data mining

FIGURE 1. Morphological and colour pattern changes from juvenile to adult in Gnathophyllum elegans (Risso, 1816). A–C. Specimens from Capo Noli (Italy, Mediterranean Sea) (~44.199232N, 8.420455E), 15–16 m, on anthropogenic debris laying on a detritic bottom, 5–13.IX.2020. A. Photo by Walter Bassi. B–C. Photos by Alessandro Raho. D. Specimen from La Laja beach, Gran Canaria (Spain, Atlantic Ocean) (~28.060335N, -15.418428E), 1 m, amidst algae in a tide pool, 29.VIII.2017. Photo by Alberto Navarro. E. Specimen from Bat Galim reef, Haifa (Israel, Mediterranean Sea) (~32.833317N, 34.97431E), 2 m, under a rock on a rocky bottom, ~2017. Photo by Sarah Ohayon. F. Specimen from Capo Caccia, Sardinia (Italy, Mediterranean Sea) (~40.565506N, 8.165579E), 5 m, detritic bottom with rocks, 28.VIII.2015. Photo by Marco Colombo.

opencc-zeroNov 2020View details →

Effects of social structure and management on risk of disease establishment in wild pigs

1. Contact heterogeneity among hosts determines invasion and spreading dynamics of infectious disease, thus its characterization is essential for identifying effective disease control strategies. Yet, little is known about the factors shaping contact networks in many wildlife species and how wildlife management actions might affect contact networks. 2. Wild pigs in North America are an invasive, socially-structured species that pose a health concern for domestic swine given their ability to transmit numerous devastating diseases such as African swine fever (ASF). Using proximity loggers and GPS data from 48 wild pigs in Florida and South Carolina, USA, we employed a probabilistic framework to estimate weighted contact networks. We determined the effects of sex, social group, and spatial distribution (monthly home range overlap and distance) on wild pig contact. We also estimated the impacts of management-induced perturbations on contact and inferred their effects on ASF establishment in wild pigs with simulation. 3. Social group membership was the primary factor influencing contacts. Between-group contacts depended primarily on space use characteristics, with fewer contacts among groups separated by >2 km and no contacts among groups >4 km apart within a month. 4. Modeling ASF dynamics on the contact network demonstrated that indirect contacts resulting from baiting (a typical method of attracting wild pigs or game species to a site to enhance recreational hunting) increased the risk of disease establishment by ~33% relative to direct contact. Low-intensity population reduction (<5.9% of the population) had no detectable impact on contact structure but reduced predicted ASF establishment risk relative to no population reduction. 5. We demonstrate an approach for understanding the relative role of spatial, social, and individual-level characteristics in shaping contact networks and predicting their effects on disease establishment risk, thus providing insight for optimizing disease control in spatially- and socially-structured wildlife species.

opencc-zeroDec 2020View details →

Hearing sensitivity and amplitude coding in bats are differentially shaped by echolocation calls and social calls

Differences in auditory perception between species are influenced by phylogenetic origin and the perceptual challenges imposed by the natural environment, e.g. detecting prey- or predator-generated sounds and communication signals. Bats are well suited for comparative studies on auditory perception since they predominantly rely on echolocation to perceive the world, while their social calls and most environmental sounds have low frequencies. We tested if hearing sensitivity and stimulus level coding in bats differ between high and low frequency ranges by measuring auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) of 86 bats belonging to 11 species. In most species, auditory sensitivity was equally good at both high and low frequency ranges, while amplitude was more finely coded for higher frequency ranges. Additionally, we conducted a phylogenetic comparative analysis by combining our ABR data with published data on 27 species. Species-specific peaks in hearing sensitivity correlated with peak frequencies of echolocation calls and pup isolation calls, suggesting that changes in hearing sensitivity evolved in response to frequency changes of echolocation and social calls. Overall, our study provides the most comprehensive comparative assessment of bat hearing capacities to date and highlights the evolutionary pressures acting on their sensory perception.

opencc-zeroDec 2020View details →

The social function of the feeling and expression of guilt

Humans are uniquely cooperative and form crucial short- and long-term social bonds between individuals that ultimately shape human societies. The need for such intense cooperation may have provided a particularly powerful selection pressure on the emotional and communicative behaviours regulating cooperative processes, such as guilt. Guilt is a social, other-oriented moral emotion that promotes relationship repair and pro-sociality. For example, people can be more lenient towards wrongdoers who display guilt than towards those who do not. Here, we examined the social consequences of guilt in a novel experimental setting with pairs of friends differing in relationship quality. Pairs of participants took part in a cooperative game with a mutual goal. We then induced guilt in one of the participants and informed the other participant of their partner's wrongdoing. We examined the outcome using a dictator game to see how they split a joint reward. We found that guilty people were motivated to repair wrongdoing regardless of friendship. Observing guilt in others led to a punishment effect and a victim of wrongdoing punished close friends who appeared guilty more so than acquaintances. We suggest, therefore, that guilt has a stronger function between close friends as the costs of relationship breakdown are greater. Relationship context, therefore, is crucial to the functional relevance of moral emotions.

opencc-zeroDec 2020View details →

Data from: Glucocorticoid levels predict subsequent social tactic in females of a facultatively social mammal

Facultatively social species, in which individuals can switch between group- and solitary-living tactics, offer an opportunity to shed light on proximate mechanisms underlying alternative life histories. Promising hormonal mediators of social tactic include glucocorticoids, which control energy allocation and are negatively related to body condition, and testosterone which regulates numerous social behaviours. Here, we investigated hormonal profiles associated with social tactic in eight generations of free-living female striped mice (Rhabdomys pumilio). Females are group living during the non-breeding season but live solitarily or with female kin in communally-breeding groups during the breeding season. We tested whether females' baseline levels of corticosterone (a glucocorticoid) and testosterone measured during the breeding season differed before and after females left the group (i.e. when they switched from a group-living to solitary social tactic), and whether the hormone levels of females that remained group living differed before and after their nestmates became solitary. We also asked whether seasonal variation in hormone levels was associated with social tactic. During the breeding season, corticosterone levels were lower in solitary than group-living females both before and after solitary females left the group, and did not differ in solitary females before and after leaving. In group-living females, corticosterone was higher after their nestmates became solitary than before they left. Testosterone levels did not differ before and after females became solitary and were not associated with social tactic. Corticosterone was higher during the breeding than the non-breeding season in group-living females but did not differ between the seasons in solitary females. Testosterone levels were higher in both social tactics during the non-breeding season. We conclude that baseline corticosterone but not testosterone levels are associated with female social tactic, and that corticosterone levels at the start of the breeding season, when all females are group living, may be an indicator of subsequent tactic: solitary females' corticosterone levels were lower than those of females that remained group living even before the solitary phenotype was expressed. Glucocorticoids might therefore play a modulatory role in social organisation in facultatively social species.

opencc-by-4.0Dec 2020View details →

Social representations and interface layout: a new way of enhancing persuasive technology applied to organ donation

Although campaigns promoting organ donation have proved their effectiveness, increasing the number of people who explicitly agree to become donors is still difficult. Based on the social marketing notion of persuasive technology, we reasoned that it was timely to focus on the design of this persuasive technology and to analyze its contribution in particularly challenging contexts such as organ donation. More specifically, the originality of the present study lay in the way we linked the field of persuasive technology to the theory of social representations, and combined them with an analysis of the ergonomic aspects of interface layout. This study had two complementary goals. The first was to determine whether the sociocognitive salience of the central elements of social representations (i.e., the most frequent and important themes related to the subject—here, organ donation—for individuals), can be used to achieve persuasive outcomes. The second was to determine whether interface layout, in terms of information location and background characteristics (color and contrast), can strengthen the persuasive impact. University students (N > 200) were exposed to a computer screen displaying a message involving either central or peripheral elements of the social representations of organ donation (status), placed either in the middle or on one side of the screen (location), and shown against either a white or a blue background (background). Eye-tracking data were recorded, in addition to self-reported data. In line with the elaboration likelihood model, results showed that participants who were exposed to central (vs. peripheral) elements of the social representations of organ donation followed the central route in processing information. Moreover, they had stronger attitudes, and more of them stated that they were actual organ donors. Importantly, however, at least for some variables, these status-related effects were not independent of the interface layout. More specifically, the persuasive impact of the central elements was enhanced when the information was displayed in the middle (vs. the side) of the screen and when it was displayed on a white (vs. blue) background. We discuss the theoretical and practical issues raised by these results.

opencc-zeroDec 2019View details →

Transitions in paternal social status predict patterns of offspring growth and metabolic transcription

Parental effects occur when changes in the parental phenotype or environment cause changes to offspring phenotype. While some parental effects are triggered in response to an environmental cue in a time-locked fashion, other parental effects persist even after the cue has been removed, suggesting multiple timescales of action. For parental effects to serve as reliable signals of current environmental conditions, they should be reversible, such that when the cue changes, offspring phenotypes change in accordance. Social hierarchy is a prevalent feature of the environment, and current parental social status could signal the environment in which offspring will be born. Here, we sought to address parental effects of social status and their timescale of action in mice. We show that competition in seminatural environments affects offspring growth rate. Although dominant males are not heavier than nondominant or control males, they produce faster growing offspring, particularly sons. The timing, effect-size, and sex-specificity of this association are modulated by maternal social experience. We show that a change in paternal social status is sufficient to modulate offspring weight: from one breeding cycle to the next, status-ascending males produce heavier sons than before, and status-descending males produce lighter sons than before. Current paternal status is also highly predictive of liver transcription in sons, including molecular pathways controlling oxidative phosphorylation and iron metabolism. These results are consistent with a parental effect of social experience, although alternative explanations are considered. In summary, changes in paternal social status are associated with changes in offspring growth and metabolism.

opencc-by-4.0Dec 2020View details →

Social isolation induces hyperactivity and exploration in aged female mice - Raw Data

Raw data for the publication Social isolation induces hyperactivity and exploration in aged female mice accepted in PLOS One. Data is public for transparency and future utilization.

Whistle variation in Mediterranean common bottlenose dolphin: the role of geographical, anthropogenic, social and behavioural factors

The studies on the variation of acoustic communication in different species have provided insight that genetics, geographic isolation and adaptation to ecological and social conditions play important roles in the variability of acoustic signals. The dolphin whistles are communication signals that can vary significantly among and within populations. Although it is known that they are influenced by different environmental and social variables, the factors influencing the variation between populations have received scant attention. In the present study, we investigated the factors associated to the acoustic variability in the whistles of common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus), inhabiting two Mediterranean areas (Sardinia and Croatia). We explored which factors, among 1) geographical isolation of populations, 2) different environments in terms of noise and boat presence and 3) social factors (including group size, behaviour and presence of calves), were associated to whistle characteristics. We first applied a principal component analysis to reduce the number of collinear whistle frequency and temporal characteristics, and then generalised linear mixed models on the first two principal components. The study revealed that both geographic distance/isolation and local environment are associated to whistle variations between localities. The prominent differences in the acoustic environments between the two areas, which contributed to the acoustic variability in the first principal component (PC1), were found. The calf's presence and foraging and social behaviour were also found to be associated with dolphin whistle variation. The second principal component (PC2) was associated only to locality and group size, showing that longer and more complex tonal sound may facilitate individual recognition and cohesion in social groups. Thus, both social and behavioural context influenced significantly the structure of whistles, and they should be considered when investigating acoustic variability among distant dolphin populations to avoid confounding factors.

Social contagion of affiliation in female macaques

Social contagion of non-interactive behavior is widespread among animals including humans. It is thought to facilitate behavioral synchronization and consequently group cohesion, coordination, and opportunities for social learning. Contagion of interactive behavior - particularly affiliation - has received much less attention. Here, we investigated in female rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) the effect of observing group members groom on a subject's subsequent grooming behavior and the potential modulation of contagion by relationship quality and social status. We recorded behavior after subjects witnessed a grooming event and compared it to behavior in a control condition with the same individuals in proximity but in the absence of a stimulus grooming event. Compared to the control condition, after observing others groom, females engaged in a grooming interaction sooner, and were more likely to be the initiator and to take on the active groomer role. Dominance rank of the focal individual and more weakly also of the stimulus individuals affected the latency to the next grooming interaction of the focal subject. Latency to the next grooming interaction decreased with increasing rank of the subject potentially reflecting lower social constraints faced by high ranking individuals in this highly despotic species. Relationship quality between the subject and the stimulus individuals had no effect on latency to grooming. Collectively, our findings provide evidence for visual contagion of affiliation in rhesus macaques. Future studies should explore the systematic variation in contagion of interactive behavior in relation to a gradient of social tolerance.

Data from: Kin relationships in cultural species of the marine realm: case study of a matrilineal social group of sperm whales off Mauritius Island, Indian Ocean

Understanding the organization and dynamics of social groups of marine mammals through the study of kin relationships is particularly challenging. Here we studied a stable social group of sperm whales off Mauritius, using underwater observations, individual-specific identification, non-invasive sampling, and genetic analyses based on mitochondrial sequencing and microsatellite profiling. Twenty-four sperm whales were sampled between 2017 and 2019. All individuals except one adult female shared the same mtDNA haplotype—one that is rare in the Western Indian Ocean—thus confirming with near certainty the matrilineality of the group. All probable first- and second-degree kin relationships were depicted in a sperm whale social group: 13 first-degree and 34 second-degree relationships were identified. Notably, we highlight the likely case of an unrelated female having been integrated into a social unit, in that she presented a distinct mtDNA haplotype and no close relationships with any members of the group. Investigating the possible matrilineality of sperm whale cultural units (i.e., vocal clans) is the next step in our research program to elucidate and better apprehend the complex organization of sperm whale social groups.

Supplementary files for: How can the MHC mediate social odor via the microbiota community? A deep dive into mechanisms

Genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) have long been linked to odor signaling and recently researchers' attention has focused on MHC structuring of microbial communities and how this may in turn impact odor. However, understanding of the mechanisms through which the MHC could affect the microbiota to produce a chemical signal that is both reliable and strong enough to ensure unambiguous transmission of behaviorally important information remains poor. This is largely because empirical studies are rare, predictions are unclear, and the underlying immunological mechanisms governing MHC-microbiota interactions are often neglected. Here we review the immunological processes involving MHC class II (MHC-II) that could affect the commensal community. Focusing on immunological and medical research, we provide background knowledge for non-immunologists by describing key players within the vertebrate immune system relating to MHC-II molecules (which present extracellular-derived peptides, and thus interact with extracellular commensal microbes). We then systematically review the literature investigating MHC-odor-microbiota interactions in animals and identify areas for future research. These insights will help to design studies that are able to explore the role of MHC-II and the microbiota in the behavior of wild populations in their natural environment and consequently propel this research area forward.