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• Human activities can cause rapid changes in the environment.

• Large animals are likely to survive in this rapidly changing environment as long as they have high levels of behavioral flexibility.

• Chimpanzees are animals that form close-bonded social groups and display high fission-fusion dynamics.

• Fission-fusion dynamics is a property of social system that displays time-related variation in cohesion, subgroup size and composition.^[1]

• Researchers examined the social responses in chimpanzees to determine the animal’s resilience to dynamic human activities and improve human-wildlife interactions.

• Researchers studied the social adjustment of chimpanzees to risks introduced by human-modified landscape in Uganda.

• The study occured simultaneously with the seasonal availability of cultivated jackfruit.

• Jackfruit is a dominant tropical fruit that can be found in croplands and village garden.

• The party size of chimpanzees decreased when they moved from low-risk natural habitat to high-risk habitat such as croplands and village regions, driven mostly by parties with fewer females.

• Researchers found that the chimpanzee social structure showed partial flexibility in response to human activity risk.

• Males were more central than females in high-risk habitat.

• Sex differences were observed to be driven by changes to membership between habitat types.

• The study suggests that human activity risk can trigger repeated adjustments to chimpanzee groups in response to changing environment that modify the social lives of chimpanzees in various ways.

• As a result, grouping pattern changes caused by human-induced activity could impact ecological and evolutionary processes triggered by social structure, including the spread of infectious disease.

Sources:

Zoe M. Satsias et al. (2022). Sex-specific responses to anthropogenic risk shape wild chimpanzee social networks in a human-impacted landscape, Animal Behaviour. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2022.01.016

[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2018.0532

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