Events Detail

Speaker:
Dr. Camille Testard, Harvard University

Join the talk on Zoom

Global warming intensifies weather-related disasters that radically and persistently alter ecosystems1. Whether such drastic events alter selection on patterns of social interactions amongst group-living animals remains untested. After a devastating hurricane destroyed over 60% of the vegetation on a small Caribbean island, instead of being more competitive, resident rhesus macaques became more tolerant of each other and expanded their social networks. Five years later, monkeys were still more tolerant of conspecifics in their vicinity compared to before the storm, and social tolerance predicted individual survival in this severely transformed landscape. Importantly, social tolerance did not predict survival before the hurricane, suggesting that natural disasters can alter selection on sociality, leading to flexible adjustments in how they interact with others. What are the neurobiological underpinnings of macaques’ ability to socially connect and flexibly adjust their social relationships in times of need? Using new wireless neuro-technology suited for primates, we uncover neural signatures of macaques’ natural behavioural repertoire, and that of key social behaviours supporting friendships and alliances: grooming reciprocity and agonistic support. By employing an ethological approach to the study of primate neurobiology, we reveal a highly-distributed neuronal ‘ledger’ of social dynamics, a potential computational foundation supporting communal life in primate societies, including our own.

Dr. Camille Testard is a behavioural ecologist and a neuroscientist studying the ecological determinants and neural mechanisms of social behaviour in primates. She brings an ethological perspective to the study of neurobiology to reveal the neural underpinnings of natural, biologically-relevant social behaviours. She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023 under the supervision of Dr. Michael Platt and Dr. Lauren Brent, and is now pursuing a post-doc with Dr. Catherine Dulac at Harvard.