The ThinkND Podcast

Our Universe Revealed, Part 3: The Medicine of Life, Social Life and Survival in Wild Baboons

• Think ND

Share episode

Episode Topic: The Medicine of Life: Social Life and Survival in Wild Baboons

Beth Archie Ph.D., is the Nieuwland collegiate professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies the social lives of wild baboons in Kenya's Amboseli ecosystem. Her work focuses on how social relationships affect an animal's health, disease risk, and survival. Using data from the Amboseli Baboon Research Project, she shows that socially connected baboons live longer and that early-life adversity can shorten their lifespan. She also shares new findings on the role of fathers in baboon societies, revealing that a strong social relationship with a father can buffer against adversity and lead to increased survival in their daughters.

Featured Speakers:

  • Beth Archie Ph.D., Nieuwland Collegiate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame.

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/06c9b5.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Our Universe Revealed.

Thanks for listening! The ThinkND Podcast is brought to you by ThinkND, the University of Notre Dame's online learning community. We connect you with videos, podcasts, articles, courses, and other resources to inspire minds and spark conversations on topics that matter to you — everything from faith and politics, to science, technology, and your career.

  • Learn more about ThinkND and register for upcoming live events at think.nd.edu.
  • Join our LinkedIn community for updates, episode clips, and more.

Thank you everyone for being here this evening to attend our last lecture for the spring of our universe revealed. My name is Maggie Fink. I'm a postdoc at the University of Notre Dame and I'll be the moderator for tonight's talk. So the Our Universe Revealed Lecture series includes talks in science and the arts. Steam for everyone. We feature research and creative work being done in our region, and an opportunity to be curious about ourselves, our world, and our universe. This is a partnership between the St. Joseph County Public Library, Indiana University, south Bend, as well as the University of Notre Dame. Tonight we have Dr. Beth Archie, who will be giving our talk. Dr. Beth Archie is a professor of behavioral and disease ecology at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Archie received her PhD from Duke University and she did her postdoctoral work at the Smithsonian National Zoo, as well as the University of Montana before she came here to South Bend at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on how social relationships affect animals' health, disease, risk, and survival. Two of the big questions that her lab asks are, how does social organization and behavior affect the spread of parasites and microbes within and between social groups? And how does social relationships influence individual health, disease risk, immune function, and survival? So please join me in welcoming Dr. Beth Archie. Thanks guys, and thanks so much for everyone who came out and for inviting me to speak. It's like a great honor to come and, and talk to you guys about what we've been doing. So, let's see. I guess I've got a title slide up here, and we can scoot past that. So, my background is in animal behavior and when I was first starting in animal behavior, the question that really grabbed me. Was trying to understand how it is and why it is that animals form social relationships with each other. And the simple answer to that question is that animals have a whole bunch of problems they have to solve. They have to find food, they have to raise their offspring. They have to avoid being eaten by predators. And one of the main ways they solve those problems in their lives is through social interactions with others and forming friendships with other members of their species. So tonight, as you heard in the introduction, um, I wanna talk to you guys a little bit about what we've found about the relationship between, an individual or an animal's social relationships and their health and longevity. but before I do that, I wanna talk a little bit about those relationships in humans, um, because I think it'll give us a little bit of context for why I am telling you about this. So, humans are also social animals, so, but that probably won't come as a surprise to you. you know, it's so obvious that it almost isn't worth saying that, you know, forming friendships is an essential part of the human experience. we, also I think maybe have an intuitive sense that. There's a connection between your social relationships and your health, and that the quote from my title, is, I think it's something like A Faithful Friend is the Medicine of Life. And this is a quote that comes from biblical apocrypha. So it's, you know, thousands of years old. And it's this idea that being social and having friendships can make you healthy and happy and increase your wellbeing. We know this kind of intuitively, but it's also been the subject of a lot of scientific research, especially over the last few decades. Okay. Um, what we know is that people who form strong and supportive social relationships or feel like they are in a, a supportive community or feel a sense of inclusion, tend to be healthier and live longer than people that are socially isolated. And so, um, what I'm showing you up here is, a graph that comes from a pretty cool paper that came out in 2010. And what they did was they summarized all the effects from 148 different studies. Over 300,000 participants in these studies. And what they did was they compared the effects of social relationships and social support on lifespan compared to other things we think are big predictors of health, like smoking and physical exercise and those kind of things. And what they found is that, social relationships are just as important, if not more important in predicting health and longevity than these other things like smoking and physical exercise. So all of these effects, were in adult humans. and so we know, you know, social relationships are important for health in adulthood. The social and other aspects of your environment early in life are also, of course, very important for early development, learning, and then also extend have effects that extend into adulthood and predict health and longevity in adulthood and this sort of early life effects and those effects and adulthood are often referred to as the long arm of early life. Okay. And one way you may have heard about these kinds of effects, um, is through a concepts called, adverse childhood experiences, sometimes shortened to be ACEs. And this is the idea that experiencing trauma, you know, war, famine, uh, experiencing the loss of a parent, an being a victim of neglect or abuse. All of these things, if they occur early in life, can really add up over your lifetime. And we now know that those experiences can lead to real differences in health and longevity in adulthood. Okay, so these are some, you know, difficult and sad topics. these results that we know about come from population studies. Okay. Um, like I've, like I'm showing you up here and, Probably you guys know this, but what population studies do or people who work on population studies, these researchers, what they do is they try to as best as they can. Follow, people throughout the course of their life, they identify those people. They ask them things about their early life. They ask them things about their adult conditions, and then they track them, um, repeatedly, often, you know, every few years they'll come back and visit them and ask them, you know, what is your health status? Look at how long they live. and these studies have have really shown us that, social and environmental conditions have profound effects on health. It also probably goes without saying that doing those kinds of really careful population studies in humans is really hard. Okay? There's a lot of reasons why they're expensive. Uh, there's, you know, you have to follow tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. The logistics of that are challenging. Humans live a really long time, so if you are a human trying to study other humans, you're, you will run out of years. It takes a human lifespan to study just a single human lifespan. sometimes there's also a lot of complexity of human life, so things that drive our health are not just our social relationships and environment, but also our behaviors, as I already alluded to, like smoking and physical exercise. So those sort of health risk behaviors can complicate the results. and then another challenge is that a lot of the, when you go out and ask people about their social relationships or their early life, people's memories are not perfect. And so they don't recall their early life, uh, as well as they could, or they, sort of have challenges sort of describing or, or remembering even their current social relationships or past social relationships. So these are, these are some, some difficulties and, I dunno, maybe surprisingly. Some of these difficulties can actually be solved by doing long-term research on animals, because animals are social, but their social conditions and their environments are a lot simpler than what we experience in humans. Okay, so, initially think so at the end of the 1960s, ecologists and evolutionary biologists for the very first time. Began watching the lives of individual wild animals in populations. Jane Goodall would be an example of a biologist who did this. and so for the very first time, they followed these animals from the day they're born to the day they died or disappeared. And they did so in sort of very systematic way, in an unbiased way. And the parallels between how those ecologists and evolutionary biologists were watching animals, the parallels between those. Ways of studying animals and human population studies make these animal studies really useful for providing context to the drivers of human health. Okay. And those are the sorts of questions that have motivated, a lot of the work in my group. So I'm very lucky to help, uh, direct one such study. Uh, it's called the Ambi Baboon Research Project. Uh, it's located in southern Kenya, uh, just outside a park called Ambi National Park. And it was founded, more than 50 years ago to understand, baboon and really primates social behavior, ecology, demography, genetics. So not designed to understand human health. But over time it's become very useful for understanding, sort of give context to human health. So the project is directed by, uh, my PhD supervisor, Susan Alberts, myself at Notre Dame and my, le former PhD lab mate, Jenny Tongue. and so the three of us run this project together. And all of our data are collected by a team of field assistants in Kenya who are out there right now, 52 weeks a year, six days a week, um, studying the baboons. Okay? So everybody in this picture contributes to, uh, the data that we collect, but I particularly wanna point out three people. Uh, Lillian Eme, who's our, project director or project manager who's been with us for just a couple of years. Terre, who's sort of our second in command. He's been with us for more than 20 years. Uh, and our newest field assistant, Daniel Kna. and so those guys are out there. yeah, collecting a lot of the data that I'm gonna show you. So we are based, in a field camp, just outside the National Park in Amba. Amba is near Kilimanjaro, so you can see Kilimanjaro from our camp. Um, and this is a picture of my tent and where I live, uh, when I'm out there contributing, to the project and, and, and performing field work. And so I go there about three times a year. I probably spend about a month and a half out of every year there. and it's a really special and cool place to be. I really enjoy spending time there. and of course in Amba, it's a national park, so we have more than just baboons. You know, there's, when you travel around the park, uh, you see all kinds of, animals, you know. Jackals cheetahs lions. You can see Kilimanjaro in the background of this lion picture. Sometimes elephants come by. So, um, it's a really cool place to get to spend time. I feel very lucky to be there. So how, how do we collect our data and like how are we a population study of, of baboons? so, as I mentioned, our field team is out there 52 weeks a year, six days a week. Following the lives of individual animals, we follow five different social groups. A few members of each social group have radio collars on them. So we can, even though they're wild animals that are just sort of free ranging, we can always sort of find them by tracking them down using the radio collars. together it's about 250 animals that we track, and over the history of the project, you know, since the early seventies, we've followed about 2000 animals. We're collecting data on their social lives, uh, reproduction. Who are they fighting with? Who are they friends with? births and deaths, wounds, you know, biological samples, like if you can think of it and we can collect it, we probably collect it. So that's what we're spending our time doing. So. As I mentioned, all the animals really are known as individuals and they also have names that we've given them. We don't think they know their names, but we know their names. So, so for example, up here we have a female named Flank. She's wearing one of the radio collars I described. She's missing an eye, so that would be a very easy trait that we could use to recognize her. Um, she has two kids, Faki and Filo, and she's actually also snuggling with the kid of another female whose name is Bahati. And so basically our team or anyone who wants to study the baboons, goes out and invests time in learning to recognize them as individuals. So they're not marked in any way, but you learn. I'll actually show you the next slide. These are the notes that I use when I'm trying to remember who's who. Um, so. On the left here is, you know the names of the animals, Cobra Coda, Connic Cyclone, and then here's my notes. And little drawings about like, oh, she has a flat head and she looks like a horse, and this one looks like a German Shepherd. Just like little notes that mean something to me that will help me remember them when I come back. And I think you sort of grow a part of your, like the part of your brain that recognizes human faces. And sort of translate it to baboons. it takes a lot of effort, but it's, it's really amazing, if you can succeed. So, so that's how we recognize animals. So baboons are one of the most, widely distributed primates, in the world. I think second to Maccas. So they are distributed across all of Sub-Saharan Africa. There's five different subspecies, and the ones that we study are actually hybrids between that one up top, the Anubis or olive baboon, and the yellow baboon that's down here. So our field site is right here, right between the border of Kenya and Tanzania, and right in that hybrid zone between those two subspecies. so as an animal that is very widely distributed, um, they are also extremely sort of ecologically and behaviorally very flexible. So we find baboons living in forests. they also can live in Savannahs and in deserts. They're also very good at sort of scrounging resources that they can get from human ecosystems. Um, and so they will raid crops. They live in suburbs. They're increasingly living in cities, so very flexible primates. They're also, Genetically really similar to humans. So humans and baboons last shared a common ancestor about 25 to 30 million years ago. And if we compare our genomes to theirs, they're similar to the level of about 91 to 94% similar. but the thing that I don't know always strikes me as. Amic cell is a very dusty place, so there's lots of tracks that the animals leave. And this is a hand print from a baboon and if you saw it, it looks like, you know, a five-year-old child left that hand print. So you can almost, you know, you can see the human resemblance, in that hand print. So a few other details about, baboon societies that might be useful to know. So they are terrestrial. In other words, they spend a lot of their time on the ground, which is great because we can see all their behaviors and see their social relationships as opposed to trying to like track them through the treaties using binoculars. Okay? So that's one great thing. the social groups that we follow range in size from as few as 20 animals to as many as 150 animals. and those include, those groups include multiple adult males, multiple adult females, and their offspring. Okay. So when, um, a baby baboon reaches maturity, females stay in the same group their whole lives together with their moms and their sisters and their grandmothers and their aunts. when males reach maturity, they leave. So they get up and they go and join a different social group, and they may do so repeatedly across adulthood, sort of bouncing around to a bunch of different groups. Okay. Um. Then as we might expect for a social animal, they do form, they form friendships with each other. You know, they have, we call them differentiated social bonds, but that's really jargony, right? They have special relationships with each other. Those relationships last for years. Um, some animals are friends, some animals are not friends. Their lives also are governed by pretty steep dominance hierarchies. It's pretty easy to identify within males. A number one baboon, a number two, a number three, and a pecking order. And you can do the same thing for female baboons. So let's just a little bit about what their lives are like. So what I wanna do now is tell you a little bit about some of the things we found. So I'll tell you. Just sort of three sets of results. first I wanna talk about what we've found with respect to social connectedness and survival. sort of harking back to the, the patterns that we know of in humans. Um, I'll also talk about early life adversity in adult survival, and then I'll spend, um, maybe the most time, talking about our newest project that I'm kind of excited about. looking at the role of baboon fathers, uh, in the lives of their daughters, across adulthood. So adult social connectedness and survival. so inspired by that Holt LTA paper and, and those, all those papers finding those effects, in humans. what we did was we, went out and as part of the regular data that we collect, we collect a lot of grooming observations. So for baboons, one of the easiest way is to know that two baboons are friends, is if they're sitting down and grooming each other. It's basically like for them sitting down and having a cup of coffee and a chat. Okay. They sit there, they groom through each other's fur for a few minutes. So we went out, we collected data on those. every grooming interaction we see, we write it down. And over the years we've collected many tens of thousands of grooming interactions, probably even more, but let's say tens of thousands of grooming interactions. Okay. And, we used those to calculate for every female in every year of her life, from birthday to birthday, how social was she compared to every other baboon, every other female baboon in this population in that year. Okay. So we could sort of identify who is really social and who was socially isolated. And we did that for 204 females. and what we found. Is that just like we see in humans, socially connected females live about two to three years longer than females who are socially isolated. Oh, resolution on this plot is not so great. But, I'll, I'm gonna show you a few survival plots in this talk, so I want to step you through how to interpret them in case you haven't seen one before across the this horizontal X axis here. We've got the animals age in years. So zero five, this should be a 10, 15, 20. So in units of five, and the Y axis is the proportion of animals surviving at the top, you've got a hundred percent. So everyone's alive at the bottom. You've got, everybody is dead. Okay? So that's the axes of the graph. And I find one easy way to interpret them is if you, well, let me, uh, quickly say. The blue line shows us animals who are in the top 25% most social baboons in a given year of their life. The red line shows us animals who are in the bottom, socially isolated quartile in that year of their life. And if you take a year, like let's say age 15 and sort of draw a line up, we see that for 15-year-old baboons, only about half of them are still alive if they're socially isolated, but. For the socially connected baboons, maybe 70 or 75% are still alive. Okay? So that's sort of how you can read that graph. and so basically, you know, being socially connected is good and it leads to a two to three year survival advantage, just like we see in humans. So since this result, people have looked, in many places, uh, to try to understand the relationship between social relationships and, and health and longevity. And we see it all over the place. So we see it in in orcas and dolphins and bighorn sheep animals that are socially connected are seem to be healthier and seem to live longer. And what this tells us is that, social, the effects of social connectedness on health are not just due to. Access to healthcare or having a friend that will drive you to a hospital. There's no hospitals for these guys, right? It tells us that there's something about that relationship is part of our fundamental biology that exists outside the sort of complexity of a human society. Okay? So. Another set of results I can tell you guys about are what we've done sort of modeling that ACEs study that I, that I discussed, is looking at adverse, experiences early in life. Okay? So what we did in this study was we tried to think what are the kinds of things that can happen early in the life of a baboon that would be an adverse event, okay? And we came up with six possible sources of adversity. One would be living through a drought or experiencing a drought in the first year of life. a drought would lead to a famine for a baboon, growing up in an especially large social group where there might be a lot of competition for resources, aspects of their family structure. So experiencing the loss of their mother in the first four years of life. We chose four years,'cause females matured about four and a half. So from age zero to four is about the length of a juvenile baboon's, juvenile period. having a competing younger sibling. So having a sibling born, especially close in time to your own birth. which for a baboon tends to be about a year and a half after your birth. That's very close. Um, or within a year and a half. That might divert your mom's attention. Okay. That would be another potential source of adversity. And then we also looked at aspects of the mom's social environment. So having a low ranking mother, uh, or a mother who is socially isolated. And what we did was for each female in our dataset, we added up the number of things that she experienced throughout the first four years of her life. And then we sort of started the clock at age four and asked how long did she live and what we found. It's a pretty profound effect on female survival. high adversity females tend to lead lives that are almost 10 years shorter than females who have very few of these sources of adversity. So again, on this survival plot, we've got survival on, on the Y axis age, on the a axis, the blue line are the lucky baboons who had none of those six bad things happen to them in the first four years of their life. The red line are female baboons who had three or more of those ACEs happening, uh, early in their life. and you can see there's a quite a large difference, uh, in lifespan, again, replicating these effects that are quite well known in humans. We also found that experiencing ACEs for a baboon also leads to a little bit of social isolation. So on the horizontal axis here, we've got how many ACEs did she experience? How many of these sort of adverse circumstances, the y axis is how socially connected is she? There's a lot of noise in these data, but animals who experience more adversity tend to be a little bit more socially isolated, than others. And it sort of shows this intertwining between how what you, what happens in your early life can affect your social environment and adulthood. For us, it also really raised the question, okay, wait. You know, we know social connectedness predicts longevity is the reason why early adversity, uh, is affecting lifespan. Is that sort of mediated through that sort of, social experience in adulthood, that social isolation in adulthood. so I'll actually sort of redraw that here. But, so in other words, our is, is. Animals direct experience in their early life, their social environment, and their, and those harsh conditions in early life. Is that having a direct effect on their adult health and survival, or is it mediated through their relationships in adulthood, that social isolation in adulthood and skipping past a lot of, complicated stats that aren't that fun to talk about? Um, what we found is that, actually these two. Factors are completely independent. So, the, basically the, relationships and environment and early life have profound effects on adult longevity. And the adult social environment also affects longevity. But the two effects are not very strongly related to each other. Okay. This is actually good news because it means. Conditions in adulthood and social relationships in adulthood can then be manipulated and actually buffer individuals against early life adversity. Um, this can be sort of, a potential source of resilience. In other words, experiencing early life adversity isn't, it's not a foregone conclusion that you'll have that social relationships will be. Challenging in adulthood, and that will necessarily lead to, worse health. In other words, they're both somewhat independent and their independence allows one to, to sort of buffer the other. Okay. So I'll tell you this last sort of result that we've been working on most recently, um, which is trying to understand, the role of fathers in the early life of. Juvenile females and their effects on, females in adulthood and whether fathers can also maybe be buffers against early life adversity. So, in most mammals, not true in humans, but in most mammals, almost all of the parental care, the meaningful parental care is provided by mothers. It's in part because females gestate and they lactate. It's hard for males to do that. but There's in, in most societies, males don't make substantial care like contributions to offspring care and instead the quality of maternal care, we know in mammals, um, has really profound consequences for things like their offspring's gene expression, how they're gonna respond to stressful events later in life. social integration and survival. So, as I mentioned. This kind of care from dads is unusual. Okay. Um, it across the mammal tree of life. Okay. So we know of a couple of exceptions. So of course humans are a real exception. And humans, both parents contribute substantially to parent parental care. Males really provide, uh, you know, a lot to their kids. and we know from human population studies. That paternal absence in childhood can be associated with, or can have consequences for adult behavior, perhaps for, um, aspects of income attainment for health and mortality risk. The other group of mammals where we see a lot of male parental care is also some species of rodents. So, uh, in some rodents, fathers, provide equivalent care to mothers. They can't just and lactate, but they do provide resources. They might carry the offspring. Um, they might provide dusting material. and so, and fathers also affect the complexity of offspring social environments. So male care, it's really unusual in mammals, but in a much wider set of mammals. Dads do have a chance to sort of socialize and interact with their kids, even if they're not providing a lot of obvious resources to them. Okay? And that includes, you know, a range of animals. Lions, for instance. Males don't really provide a lot of care, but they do have a chance to interact with their cubs. Um, gorillas, baboons, spotted hyenas, European badgers. Anyway, so a big variety of mammals. There's sort of this chance for them to socialize. Okay? So we set out to try to understand since baboons are in this category of males who could interact with their kids, but but don't really provide a lot of material support to them. we, we looked in baboons and we knew a couple things already. So first of all, one interesting thing about baboon mating systems is that female baboons and male baboons mate multiply. So when a female's fertile, she's gonna mate with multiple males. And that means from the dad's perspective, it's kind of hard for him to know whether he's the father or not. And that in fact might be one reason why he doesn't provide a lot of care.'cause he is not really sure he's the father. Okay. And yet, earlier work in our population and other baboon populations shows that males seem to be able to make good guesses about who their kids are. We know this because when we watch and baby baboons get into little scuffles and fights, their dads are the ones who often come in and rescue them and defend them against other animals in the group. And when I say the, the dads, we actually know this from doing like genetic paternity testing. So we're not guessing who the dads are. We're using, we're using DNA to figure out who everybody's parent is. Okay? So we knew this going in that dads probably knew who their kids were. So in this study we looked at 216 juvenile female baboons, so less than age four. Okay. they were born to 117 different moms and had 102 different dads known genetically and. We didn't, you know, they don't provide a lot of material care, but we did look at their social relationships. So we looked at two aspects of their social relationships. We looked at how much the dads and the, and the daughters groomed, and we looked at how long they lived together. The idea being the longer they lived together, maybe the stronger their social bond. Okay. We also had complete information on those six early life adversity conditions I mentioned, a few slides ago. So as we expected, we saw that the juvenile baboons did, those females did vary a lot in how long they lived with their dads. Okay, so here we have on the horizontal axis. How long did the father and daughter live together from Not at all to four years. And then each line here represents one of the females in our dataset. And you can see that about a third of the females. Actually lived with their dad for nearly all four years and 6% never lived with their father. So a big variation in how long they lived together. We also saw, male, you know, fathers and daughters do groom each other fairly often, and but the nature of those relationships interestingly kind of changes as the females age in the first. Oh wow. That's really hard to see. Well, I'll just tell you, in the first year of life. The dad is the one initiating all the grooming. The infant female baboon. She's too young, she's too uncoordinated. The dad is going up and grooming her, but after about age one, they switch and it's the daughter putting in the effort, seeking out the dad and grooming the dad. Okay, so we wanted to know does living together with your dad and grooming your dad predict lifespan? And we found that in fact. Females who groom more with their dads early in life, controlling for how long they live together. So given that they're living together, if you groom each other more, does it lead to a longer life? And we found that indeed it does. So again, we have age on the X axis. Um, this is, and it's how long they live in adulthood. and then the y axis is, you know, how many are surviving. And basically females who are in the have like a strong grooming relationship with their dad or in that dark green line. They live a couple years longer in adulthood than females who had a weak grooming relationship with their dad. We see the same thing for how long they lived together, which I'm calling co residency here. So how long are they living together if they lived together? for a long time. This is actually for more than three years, uh, in that dark blue line. They're living a little bit longer in adulthood than if they are, that if they never, uh, live together with their dad. Okay? And so this shows us that there's something about this social relationship, um, that is promoting survival in adulthood. and. Not only that, but having a dad around in early life can help buffer those juveniles against those, sources of early life adversity. And so, what I've shown here, so the, the solid lines here on each graph are showing animals that had only one or no sources of early adversity in their life. And the dash lines are showing females who had three or more of those sources of adversity in their life. You can see that if you have a strong relationship with your dad, this dark blue dashed line, you catch up to, you know, a female who has no sources of adversity and a weak relationship with her dad, but you start to look like a female who's had no adversity. In other words, dads can sort of help buffer those females against the challenges of having a harsh early life. So what does this mean? So we often think of primates in a category of animals that doesn't, aside from humans, a category of animals that doesn't have a lot of male parental care. but I think what these data show is that there's some real benefits for a female's lifespan for having a relationship with her dad. So evolutionarily fa fathers and daughters in baboons may experience sort of selection to become friends and have a relationship and stay close. and in addition, as I mentioned, it's possible that fathers might buffer their daughters against some harsh early life conditions if they can stick around, and support them. So, all right. Think though, this is my last slide. I wanna thank the very many, people that go into making all this work happen. The many members of the Amali Baboon Research Project and the institutions in Kenya that support us, uh, as well as the members of my lab, in Amba. And I am happy to, or in at Notre Dame, and I'm really happy to take any questions you guys have. So. Thanks. Yeah. I just wonder why when you were doing all of this, you focused on the females versus being the male unit. Yeah. Is it because the females stick around longer than the males too? It's a really great question. It's because, because the males disperse. Often they leave and they may go to a group that we don't know about. And so, so just to repeat the question, she asked, why are all these results on females and not on males? And it's because it's really hard to measure the lifespan of a male baboon because they're dispersing. When they disappear. We're like, maybe he died or maybe he dispersed and we don't know. For females because they live in the same social group their whole lives. When they disappear, we're like 99.9% sure they're dead. So yeah, that's a really good question. It makes, uh, the work really bias towards like what's shaping female lifespans. It'd be great to know more about what's shaping male lifespans. Yeah. Yeah. Do these social groups move around a lot? Go. They do. You know, they do. I'm trying to think how big an area. Like, I think the rain, you know, the area where they live is probably about 10 or 15 kilometers by 10 or 15 kilometers. So it's like a hundred to 150 square kilometers. on any given day, like some days they'll get up and they'll just wander around a little bit and go back to bed, and then some days they get up. They're like, okay, we're moving and we like spend the whole day walking and they can cover like eight kilometers. So it really varies a lot from day to day, how much they're moving. It also varies seasonally. So when food is good and there's lots of water and snacks, they don't move very much. And when it's like times are hard, they're like, okay, we gotta be focused and go out and look for food. So, yeah. Yeah. Good question. Yeah. I have a question for you. Uh, and I, I'm not sure if you know the answer to it, but, you know, there's clear evidence that being more socially involved or more social helps you health wise. It helps you live a little bit longer in Yeah. Things it seems like, but also in baboons. But what if I'm someone with social and anxiety? Is this something that's gonna put more stress on me to become part of a social group? Yeah. And then all of a sudden that benefit goes away? Yes. I think that is a really great question that has not been as explored as it should be because we know people, and I'm sure baboons also vary in what is their optimal number of friends. You know, some of us are, their optimal number is like 80 friends, and some of us, our optimal number is like two friends or zero friends. And so. Like in human, in this human studies, people are able to, they're one advantage. and you know, great thing about humans is you can ask them how they feel and feelings of loneliness really predict, you know, that says I don't have as many friends as I want. And that's a predictor of health and longevity. But I don't think we know enough about like introversion and extroversion and how that really predicts things. it's also really true in both the human studies and the baboon studies. we can't really know what's causal. A another possibility is that animals or people who are healthy and in good shape have the energy to go out and have friends. If you're not feeling very well, like you wanna stay home, and so I think both things happen. There's like a, there, there's not, there's not an either or. it's both things are very likely and both are happening very likely in baboons and of course in humans. Yeah, it's a really good question. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Do you know how do the male baboons know who their kids are? Yes. I, we don't know, but I have a guess. So one of the first things you might think of when you think of a female baboon is they have a big pink swelling on their butt. Maybe you don't think about baboons very often, so you maybe don't notice that. But anyway, they have this great signal that's like, I'm ovulating, I'm fertile. And, it, that swelling gets bigger and tighter the closer they are to ovulating. And then it deflates. I bet male baboons are really good at doing the internal calculation. They're like, you know, I mated with her when I think she was. So, I think they are really good at remembering who they mated with and what was her state of fertility and keeping track of that. I mean, it's amazing what animals can remember if like nut hatches can remember, like, I don't know where they hid 10,000. Pine nuts or whatever. I'm sure a male baboon can remember who he m it with like two months ago or six months ago. yeah. So when you're studying the tools, how close can you get to them without disrupting them or quite close? Like I can get as close to them as I am to you. Oh yeah. But only because we've been watching these animals. For, like, you can't just do that with any baboons. It's because they know us and we've worked hard to get them to treat us as though we're bumps on a log. And so it's this long process of, in the beginning, you walk up to them and they run away, and then you, it's, it's called habitation and you can do it with lots of different animals. what you want is the animal to have no negative experiences of you. And so you walk up to them and if you notice, they're like. Glancing and nervous you back off and give them space. And you just do that over weeks and eventually they get used to you and you can get closer and closer. So our field team can get much closer than I can. Like I, I try to not get that close when I'm there. I give them a lot of space. But our field team, we recently had to reprogram a radio caller on one of them, which you can now do through your phone apparently. And, that involved standing like. This close to the baboon for five minutes and they were able to like reprogram the collar, which is amazing. So, yeah. Yeah. is there any variation in the strength of friendships? Do you have some that are obviously very, very close friends? You have some that are social butterflies that know everybody, but they don't really care that much about Yes. There's definitely variation in the strength of friendships. There's some friendships that last for years and years. There's some that come in and they come out. I think there's also really, Changes in relationships with age. So it's, you really notice it when you're out there. Adolescent females who are like just young adults, they haven't had their first kid, they are social butterflies and they're running around the group and making friends with everybody. And then there's like everybody, then they have kids and they're like, Ugh, I don't have time for this. And, you know, their social networks like shrink down. So yeah. That's a good, good point. Yeah. Yeah, you said that males leave the group. Leave the troop. So, but you also talked about the males stay with the daughters. So at what age do males leave the troop? Yeah. Or great question. Or do they get kicked out or they voluntarily go? Yeah, they voluntarily go. They don't get kicked out. so when. The male first disperses, he can be anywhere as young as like three years old, which is, he's not yet an adult up till like eight or nine or 10. So he's like actually a pretty big adult at that point. And what they start doing is they go and they sit at the edge of the group and gaze romantically off into the distance. And then one day they're just gone, or they've, they're gone and they've moved to another group and we see them the next day and we're like, oh, you didn't used to live here. so. but they do that repeatedly through adulthood. So those dads, what they had done was they migrated into a new group, not the group they were born in. They sied a kid and then they stayed in that group sometime. You know, sometimes they can stay for years and years, so maybe they just move once and stay there for 10 years, or maybe they move. Then they leave. So the females who have, who didn't get to spend time with their dads, maybe their dad's dispersed, and the ones who spent all four years, they had, um, there's actually a thing that male baboons do that partly explains how long they stay. So this is a male, and you can see that he's surrounded by this like crush of babies. You like after the males, they sort of reach this prime adulthood and they sire a bunch of kids and then their condition declines a little bit and they seem to start investing more in their kids. And they don't, you don't see them like, they're not like feeding them or anything, but they just sort of sit there and the kids sort of follow them around and climb all over them and you know, anyway, so that's like a classic. Older male baboon, who's probably not sing anymore kids, but probably a bunch of these guys are his, so, yeah. Yeah. So that male baboon, does he have the collar on? Can we, yes. And their behavior, do they ever, does it bother them? Do they ever play with it? They do. Usually, maybe for the first day or two after we put it on them, and then they, it's like they forget about it. Yeah. It's surprising. We had some collars that we put on recently, and we were pretty sure they were gonna mess with them. This is actually not in amba. This was for some captive baboons we were working with in Nairobi. And so to distract them, we painted their fingernails thinking that they were gonna peel off the nail polish instead of playing with a collar. and they totally ignored both. They didn't care that they had painted fingernails and they didn't care that they were wearing a collar, like, I guess we were wrong about that. So, yeah. Yeah. Good questions. Yeah. Another question for you. You mentioned how some of them, because if they feel more isolated, you know, from the group. My question is, are they isolating because of their choice? Are they isolating because they're shunned by the others within the group? Or is it some of both? I think it's some of both. It's hard to know that, that would be one. I wish we could like interview them and ask them. They, I mean, so they, there's grooming that happens, but there's also a whole bunch of aggressive behaviors that happen. And so, I dunno if anyone's really shunned, but there are an, there do seem to be animals that nobody likes, I don't know, or they maybe are off on theirs. And then they also seem to be more like there's some that are voluntarily off on their own too. you know, the, the dominance hierarchy of a baboon. Is another big part of their life. And if you're a low ranking animal, you can constantly be getting like displaced from you sit down, you're like, oh, I finally pulled up this perfect grass plan. I'm gonna eat it up. And then someone comes and takes it from you. And that can happen repeatedly. It can happen, you know, 10 times in five minutes. And so sometimes those lower ranking animals move out away from the main group so they don't get quite as harassed. Yeah. And is harassed. Mostly, but female. Female, or is it male to female as well? It's both. It's both. So in a baboon group, all males outrank, all females. and then the, but yeah, there's, there's female. Female and there's male female. There's rarely, females are not really displacing males. It's males displacing each other or displacing females or females displacing each other. Yeah. Yeah. Good questions. I think in the beginning you mentioned that you were actually studying hybrids. Yes. So is that like a hybrid zone? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's a hybrid zone. and it's very stable. We know it's been there a long time. and usually in biology we have a sense that either maybe hybrids have like vigor and then they would spread, or sometimes there's costs to being a hybrid and so. That limits hybridization between species because the zone is so hybrid, so stable. It suggests there is a cost, but we've never been able to find one. So like we know genetically, which animals are more olive baboon and more yellow, and they seem to have the same survival, reproductive success, and we don't know why, why it hasn't spread. But yeah, it's like it's that way all across the whole. Continent, different hybrid zones between all those baboons, so yeah. Yeah. What are their, predators? lions used to be leopards, although we have a lot fewer leopards in our ecosystem now than we think we used to, uh, hyenas. For really young baboons, maybe some birds of prey. We used to have eagles that would come and grab baby baboons and fly on. so those would, I think would be the big, and humans also. So humans are not killing them to eat them, but, uh, the people that live around our baboons are pastoralists. So they make a living raising cows and goats and, baboons. Occasionally we'll take a baby goat and eat it. And so people who live around the area view the baboons as a pest, kind of the way we view like raccoons and white-tailed deer as pests as like a ubiquitous animal. Baboons are everywhere. So people don't view them as like an endangered species that needs protection or anything. So, so anyway, so sometimes people will kill baboons at our site too. Yeah. And they bring out dogs when they're ranching, you know, cattle and goats. And then the dogs will get in fights with babo. So if it's not the person, it's a dog that killed them, or, yeah. So, yeah. Yep. Yeah. I have a question. That'll be the last question for the evening. Okay. so bad bones are really useful to study human. You know, adverse childhood experiences in predict life. Is there any studies in med balloons or are they a good model for studying like intervention to see if we can find good remedies to address some of these things, or is that not a feasible option in our population? I think it would be really hard in ours, because they are wild animals and we don't intervene in their lives. So I actually think it would be. Challenging to do a meaningful intervention, but it's a good, it's a good idea down in like, not the kind of rearranging baboons like captive. Do you think that would Yeah, I think you could probably have a better chance of doing it in a captive baboon, but also the social environment that they're in already and captivity is so different than what they've evolved with that. It might be hard to know what it meant. Um. Just that dominance thing. Like a thing about having primates in captivity is because of the aggressive behavior. If you're in the wild, you can always pretty much get away from, but if you're in a enclosure, it's harder for you to get away from animals that are targeting you. So anyway, yeah, it would be interesting to do that. Yeah. Yep. Great. Thanks guys. Ooh, thank you so much. Just give a hand to Dr. Archie and really quickly before we go, um, I have two quick things. Excuse me. We asked Dr. Archie if she had any books that she would recommend for you guys if you wanted to learn more. I think we have them on like one of the last slides. Oh, no, that's fine. Since this is a talk at the library. There we go. A Primates Memoir by Robert Polsky. If you guys wanted to either capture this on your phone or write these down, and Baboon metaphysics, uh, is another one as well that she recommended. So feel free to grab a quick shot of these or remember them in your head if you'd like. And then before I move to the very last slide, I'll give you one more second if you want those. So this, like I said, is the last lecture series for the spring. In the fall, we're gonna start up again, and this will actually be the 10th year anniversary of the Our Universe Revealed Lecture Series. So we're gonna have some special guest speakers coming in from out of town, as well as some other fun events. So these are the dates that we have for the fall. Again, if you wanted to mark those on your calendars ahead of time. We'll be sharing more and giving details about the speakers we'll be having. So pay attention if you're not signed up for the newsletter for this, you can do that as well. but you can put these on your calendars Tuesday nights at 6:30 PM the first Tuesday of every month for the fall. So if everyone could give me hand once again to thank Dr. Beth Archie for being here, and thank you for coming.