The life history of human foraging: Cross-cultural and individual variation.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Koster J
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7314517 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Researchers have recently proposed that "moralistic" religions-those with moral doctrines, moralistic supernatural punishment, and lower emphasis on ritual-emerged as an effect of greater wealth and material security. One interpretation appeals to life history theory, predicting that individuals with "slow life history" strategies will be more attracted to moralistic traditions as a means to judge those with "fast life history" strategies. As we had reservations about the validity of this application of life history theory, we tested these predictions with a data set consisting of 592 individuals from eight diverse societies. Our sample includes individuals from a wide range of traditions, including world religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity, but also local traditions rooted in beliefs in animism, ancestor worship, and worship of spirits associated with nature. We first test for the presence of associations between material security, years of formal education, and reproductive success. Consistent with popular life history predictions, we find evidence that material security and education are associated with reduced reproduction. Building on this, we then test whether or not these demographic factors predict the moral concern, punitiveness, attributed knowledge-breadth, and frequency of ritual devotions towards two deities in each society. Here, we find no reliable evidence of a relationship between number of children, material security, or formal education and the individual-level religious beliefs and behaviors. We conclude with a discussion of why life-history theory is an inadequate interpretation for the emergence of factors typifying the moralistic traditions.
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Project description:Individual animals should adjust diets according to food availability. We used DNA metabarcoding to construct individual-level dietary timeseries for elephants from two family groups in Kenya varying in habitat use, social position and reproductive status. We detected at least 367 dietary plant taxa, with up to 137 unique plant sequences in one fecal sample. Results matched well-established trends: elephants tended to eat more grass when it rained and other plants when dry. Nested within these switches from 'grazing' to 'browsing' strategies, dietary DNA revealed seasonal shifts in food richness, composition and overlap between individuals. Elephants of both families converged on relatively cohesive diets in dry seasons but varied in their maintenance of cohesion during wet seasons. Dietary cohesion throughout the timeseries of the subdominant 'Artists' family was stronger and more consistently positive compared to the dominant 'Royals' family. The greater degree of individuality within the dominant family's timeseries could reflect more divergent nutritional requirements associated with calf dependency and/or priority access to preferred habitats. Whereas theory predicts that individuals should specialize on different foods under resource scarcity, our data suggest family bonds may promote cohesion and foster the emergence of diverse feeding cultures reflecting links between social behaviour and nutrition.
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Project description:Plants use their roots to forage for nutrients in heterogeneous soil environments, but different plant species vastly differ in the intensity of foraging they perform. This diversity suggests the existence of constraints on foraging at the species level. We therefore examined the relationships between the intensity of root foraging and plant body traits across species in order to estimate the degree of coordination between plant body traits and root foraging as a form of plant behavior. We cultivated 37 perennial herbaceous Central European species from open terrestrial habitats in pots with three different spatial gradients of nutrient availability (steep, shallow, and no gradient). We assessed the intensity of foraging as differences in root placement inside pots with and without a spatial gradient of resource supply. For the same set of species, we retrieved data about body traits from available databases: maximum height at maturity, mean area of leaf, specific leaf area, shoot lifespan, ability to self-propagate clonally, maximal lateral spread (in clonal plants only), realized vegetative growth in cultivation, and realized seed regeneration in cultivation. Clonal plants and plants with extensive vegetative growth showed considerably weaker foraging than their non-clonal or slow-growing counterparts. There was no phylogenetic signal in the amount of expressed root foraging intensity. Since clonal plants foraged less than non-clonals and foraging intensity did not seem to be correlated with species phylogeny, we hypothesize that clonal growth itself (i.e., the ability to develop at least partly self-sustaining ramets) may be an answer to soil heterogeneity. Whereas unitary plants use roots as organs specialized for both resource acquisition and transport to overcome spatial heterogeneity in resource supply, clonal plants separate these two functions. Becoming a clonal plant allows higher specialization at the organ level, since a typical clonal plant can be viewed as a network of self-sustainable harvesting units connected together with specialized high-throughput connection organs. This may be an effective alternative for coping with spatial heterogeneity in resource availability.
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Project description:Investigation of whole genome transcription expression level changes in Drosophila mojavensis wild-type populations (Las Bocas:LB and Punta Prieta:PP). The experiment was designed to investigate preadult life history affects over adult transcriptome expression.
2015-08-21 | GSE72231 | GEO
Project description:Investigation of whole genome transcription expression level changes in Drosophila mojavensis wild-type populations (Las Bocas:LB and Punta Prieta:PP). The experiment was designed to investigate preadult life history affects over adult transcriptome expression. A total of 137 hybridizations were performed in this entire experiment. We used 135K 12-plex NimbleGen arrays. Total RNA was recovered from each sample listed below. The experimental design consisted a total of two populations (Las Bocas:LB; Punta Prieta:PP), two host diets (Agria:AG and Organ pipe:OP) and four "length of egg to adult development time" points, i.e. 14, 15, 16, and 17 days. (14 days:D1; 15 days:D2; 16 days:D3; 17 days:D4). Each chip measures the expression level of 14528 transcripts. One to 5 replicates were used for each type (R1, R2, R3 etc.). Fly source details are as follows: Las Bocas 2009: LB09; Punta Prieta 2008:PP08.
2015-08-21 | E-GEOD-72231 | biostudies-arrayexpress
Project description:Maternal investment directly shapes early developmental conditions and therefore has long-term fitness consequences for the offspring. In oviparous species prenatal maternal investment is fixed at the time of laying. To ensure the best survival chances for most of their offspring, females must equip their eggs with the resources required to perform well under various circumstances, yet the actual mechanisms remain unknown. Here we describe the blue tit egg albumen and yolk proteome and evaluate its potential to mediate maternal effects. We show that variation in egg composition (proteins, lipids, carotenoids) primarily depends on laying order, female age and paternity (within- versus extra-pair) and that the investment in the egg proteome is functionally biased among eggs. Our results suggest that maternal effects on egg composition result from both passive and active (partly compensatory) mechanisms, and that the between- and within-clutch variation in egg composition creates diverse biochemical environments for embryonic development.
2019-01-07 | PXD009822 | Pride
Project description:Human populations show rich cultural diversity. Underpinning this diversity of tools, rituals, and cultural norms are complex interactions between cultural evolutionary and demographic processes. Most models of cultural change assume that individuals use the same learning modes and methods throughout their lives. However, empirical data on 'learning life histories'-the balance of dominant modes of learning (for example, learning from parents, peers, or unrelated elders) throughout an individual's lifetime-suggest that age structure may play a crucial role in determining learning modes and cultural evolutionary trajectories. Thus, studied in isolation, demographic and cultural evolutionary models show only part of the picture. This paper describes a mathematical and computational framework that combines demographic and cultural evolutionary methods. Using this general framework, we examine interactions between the ways in which culture is spread throughout an individual's lifetime and cultural change across generations. We show that including demographic structure alongside cultural dynamics can help to explain domain-specific patterns of cultural evolution that are a persistent feature of cultural data, and can shed new light on rare but significant demographic events.
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Project description:We tested whether the early-life environment can influence the extent of individual plasticity in a life-history trait. We asked: can the early-life environment explain why, in response to the same adult environmental cue, some individuals invest more than others in current reproduction? Moreover, can it additionally explain why investment in current reproduction trades off against survival in some individuals, but is positively correlated with survival in others? We addressed these questions using the burying beetle, which breeds on small carcasses and sometimes carries phoretic mites. These mites breed alongside the beetle, on the same resource, and are a key component of the beetle's early-life environment. We exposed female beetles to mites twice during their lives: during their development as larvae and again as adults during their first reproductive event. We measured investment in current reproduction by quantifying average larval mass and recorded the female's life span after breeding to quantify survival. We found no effect of either developing or breeding alongside mites on female reproductive investment, nor on her life span, nor did developing alongside mites influence her size. In post hoc analyses, where we considered the effect of mite number (rather than their mere presence/absence) during the female's adult breeding event, we found that females invested more in current reproduction when exposed to greater mite densities during reproduction, but only if they had been exposed to mites during development as well. Otherwise, they invested less in larvae at greater mite densities. Furthermore, females that had developed with mites exhibited a trade-off between investment in current reproduction and future survival, whereas these traits were positively correlated in females that had developed without mites. The early-life environment thus generates individual variation in life-history plasticity. We discuss whether this is because mites influence the resources available to developing young or serve as important environmental cues.
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Project description:Fishing gears are designed to exploit the natural behaviors of fish, and the concern that fishing may cause evolution of behavioral traits has been receiving increasing attention. The first intuitive expectation is that fishing causes evolution toward reduced boldness because it selectively removes actively foraging individuals due to their higher encounter rate and vulnerability to typical gear. However, life-history theory predicts that fishing, through shortened life span, favors accelerated life histories, potentially leading to increased foraging and its frequent correlate, boldness. Additionally, individuals with accelerated life histories mature younger and at a smaller size and therefore spend more of their life at a smaller size where mortality is higher. This life-history evolution may prohibit increases in risk-taking behavior and boldness, thus selecting for reduced risk-taking and boldness. Here, we aim to clarify which of these three selective patterns ends up being dominant. We study how behavior-selective fishing affects the optimal behavioral and life-history traits using a state-dependent dynamic programming model. Different gear types were modeled as being selective for foraging or hiding/resting individuals along a continuous axis, including unselective fishing. Compared with unselective harvesting, gears targeting hiding/resting individuals led toward evolution of increased foraging rates and elevated natural mortality rate, while targeting foraging individuals led to evolution of decreased foraging rates and lower natural mortality rate. Interestingly, changes were predicted for traits difficult to observe in the wild (natural mortality and behavior) whereas the more regularly observed traits (length-at-age, age at maturity, and reproductive investment) showed only little sensitivity to the behavioral selectivity.
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Project description:Human life history (LH) strategies are theoretically regulated by developmental exposure to environmental cues that ancestrally predicted LH-relevant world states (e.g., risk of morbidity-mortality). Recent modeling work has raised the question of whether the association of childhood family factors with adult LH variation arises via (i) direct sampling of external environmental cues during development and/or (ii) calibration of LH strategies to internal somatic condition (i.e., health), which itself reflects exposure to variably favorable environments. The present research tested between these possibilities through three online surveys involving a total of over 26,000 participants. Participants completed questionnaires assessing components of self-reported environmental harshness (i.e., socioeconomic status, family neglect, and neighborhood crime), health status, and various LH-related psychological and behavioral phenotypes (e.g., mating strategies, paranoia, and anxiety), modeled as a unidimensional latent variable. Structural equation models suggested that exposure to harsh ecologies had direct effects on latent LH strategy as well as indirect effects on latent LH strategy mediated via health status. These findings suggest that human LH strategies may be calibrated to both external and internal cues and that such calibrational effects manifest in a wide range of psychological and behavioral phenotypes.
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