Primate Responses To Environmental Change PDF Download

"Environments are not homogeneous or stable, even on small spatial and temporal scales. Rather, abiotic and biotic components of the environment can change and impact one another in major ways and lead to long-term shifts in the stable states of ecosystems. In this thesis I examine how environmental changes impact non-human primate populations. To this end I use historic long-term data and my own field-based studies in Uganda and the Côte d'Ivoire to provide insights into the cascading impacts environmental changes have on non-human primate behaviour, ecology and ultimately microorganism transmission. I find that changing climates and food availability have changed grouping behaviour in some species, and that these changes have cascading impacts on other behaviours including activity budgets, diets, and competitive regimes. I examine gut microbiomes of nine sympatric wild non-human primate species in a community where a strong hunter-prey relationship exists between chimpanzees and colobines. Despite sharing an environment, regular interactions, and this hunter-prey relationship, I find that individuals harbour unique and persistent microbiomes that are influenced by the host's species, social group, and their mother, but not grooming, aggression or spatial proximity. I also find a branching order of host-species phylogenies built using the composition of their microbial communities as characters, which suggests incongruence with known non-human primate phylogenetic relationships, with chimpanzees sister to their colobine prey, possibly due to broader bacterial exposure through hunting. Results suggest that changing environments, influencing changing sociality and in turn predation rates, might have major impacts on wild non-human primate microbiomes. To understand how these changes might impact humans living in proximity to these wildlife populations through the disease emergence process, I present a new method to generate full genomes from wildlife samples containing Treponema pallidum, a pathogen responsible for syphilis and yaws disease in humans. I find that this pathogen is widely distributed across primate species in Africa and that this pathogen is closely related to human yaws disease, likely representing a major reservoir. Ultimately, this suggests that environmental changes and corresponding changes in non-human primate behaviour and sociality might be changing disease risk for humans living in proximity to these wildlife populations. " --