Chimpanzees employ context-specific behavioral strategies within fission-fusion societies.

Fission-fusion social systems allow individuals to make flexible choices about where, with whom, and in what contexts to spend their time in response to competing social and ecological pressures. The ability for fission-fusion societies to support individual behavioral strategies that vary across contexts has been suggested, but the potential function of such context-specific social choices remains largely understudied. We adopted the concept of social niche construction to explore possible differences in social complexity at the individual and group level across feeding contexts.

Impacts of invasion on a freshwater cleaning symbiosis.

Organismal invasions have repeatedly been cited as a driving force behind the loss of biodiversity. Unlike many other impacts of invasion, the effect of invasion on native symbiont communities has received less attention. The introduction of invasive hosts presents a potential opportunity to native symbionts; invasive hosts could benefit native symbionts through providing a novel host environment that improves symbiont fitness relative to their fitness on native hosts.

Nonrandom foraging and resource distributions affect the relationships between host density, contact rates and parasite transmission.

Nonrandom foraging can cause animals to aggregate in resource dense areas, increasing host density, contact rates and pathogen transmission, but when should nonrandom foraging and resource distributions also have density-independent effects? Here, we used a factorial experiment with constant resource and host densities to quantify host contact rates across seven resource distributions. We also used an agent-based model to compare pathogen transmission when host movement was based on random foraging, optimal foraging or something between those states. Nonrandom foraging strongly depressed contact rates and transmission relative to the classic random movement assumptions used in most epidemiological models.

Extending the conservation impact of great ape research: Flagship species sites facilitate biodiversity assessments and land preservation.

To inform regional conservation planning, we assessed mammalian and avian biodiversity in the Djéké Triangle, which is an intact forest with long-term research and tourism focused on western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). This critical region serves as a conservation conduit between the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park (NNNP) in the Republic of Congo and the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park in Central African Republic. Wildlife inventories were conducted to determine if biodiversity in the Djéké Triangle (initially part of a logging concession) was equivalent to the NNNP.