Publications by authors named "Cecile Sarabian"
Article Synopsis
- Disgust is an evolved response aimed at reducing illness risk, linked to behaviors that help avoid parasites and toxins, but its role in wild animal disease avoidance is not well understood.
- With rising human-wildlife conflicts, understanding disgust is crucial for developing effective conservation strategies, utilizing modern tools in animal ecology for testing behaviors across various species and environments.
- The paper suggests five practical applications of disgust-related avoidance, emphasizes the need for comprehensive studies on disease and ecological interactions, discusses ethical considerations in research, and calls for a database to compile evidence on animal disease avoidance behaviors.
Article Synopsis
- Parasites have historically influenced animal behavior, prompting adaptations like the avoidance of cues that signal their presence, particularly concerning faeces.
- This study focused on two primate species, mandrills and long-tailed macaques, to examine if their aversion to faeces during foraging is linked to visual and olfactory signals.
- Findings showed mandrills consumed less food and long-tailed macaques manipulated food more when exposed to faecal cues, aligning with the infection-avoidance hypothesis, indicating a need for further research on avoidance strategies in primates.
Threats from parasites and pathogens are ubiquitous, and many use pathways that exploit host trophic interactions for their transmission. As such, host organisms have evolved a behavioural immune system to facilitate contamination-risk assessment and avoidance of potential contaminants in various contexts, including feeding. Detecting pathogen threats can rely on different sensory modalities allowing animals to screen for a wide array of contaminants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvolution of pathogen and parasite avoidance behaviours.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
July 2018
All free-living animals are subject to intense selection pressure from parasites and pathogens resulting in behavioural adaptations that can help potential hosts to avoid falling prey to parasites. This special issue on the evolution of parasite avoidance behaviour was compiled following a Royal Society meeting in 2017. Here we have assembled contributions from a wide range of disciplines including genetics, ecology, parasitology, behavioural science, ecology, psychology and epidemiology on the disease avoidance behaviour of a wide range of species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAvoiding biological contaminants is a well-known manifestation of the adaptive system of disgust. In theory, animals evolved with such a system to prevent pathogen and parasite infection. Bodily products are human-universal disgust elicitors, but whether they also elicit avoidance behaviour in non-human primates has yet to be tested.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- Social structures can impact disease risk by influencing how close individuals are and how often they interact, which is particularly relevant for primates with complex social networks.
- A study on Japanese macaques used social network analysis to identify how relationships within the group affect the transmission of a theoretical infectious agent, finding that more central individuals transmit infections faster and get infected sooner.
- However, the research showed that in some cases, the spread of disease in these macaque networks did not significantly differ from random networks, suggesting that individual characteristics may not always play a crucial role in disease transmission.
Parasites are ubiquitous in nature and can be costly to animal fitness, so hosts have evolved behavioural counter-strategies to mitigate infection risk. We investigated feeding-related infection-avoidance strategies in Japanese macaques via field-experimentation and observation. We first examined risk sensitivity during foraging tasks involving faecally contaminated or debris-covered food items, and then investigated individual tendencies to manipulate food items during natural foraging bouts.
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