Researchers propose surveillance system for Zika virus and other infectious diseases (The Lancet)

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella
Test tube image courtesy of the NIH
Image courtesy of the National Institutes of Health

By Catherine Zandonella, Office of the Dean for Research

A group of prominent researchers from seven institutions including Princeton University are calling for the establishment of a worldwide program to collect and test blood and other human bodily fluids to aid in the study and prevention of emerging infectious diseases such as the mosquito-borne Zika fever, which is caused by the Zika virus and has spread throughout Latin America and the Caribbean since early 2015.

In an article published in The Lancet April 5, the authors call for the creation of a World Serology Bank that would include storage repositories located around the world that use a common set of best practices to collect and evaluate blood and other bodily fluids from people infected by various pathogens. The resulting data would help scientists better understand the susceptibility of humans to emerging diseases such as Zika fever. The information could be shared widely among scientists who track disease.

The authors include Princeton’s C. Jessica Metcalf, an assistant professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs, and Bryan Grenfell, the Kathryn Briger and Sarah Fenton Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Public Affairs. In the interview below, Metcalf explains more about the World Serology Bank proposal.

Why is it important to create a World Serology Bank?

Serology is the study of bodily fluids including serum, the part of the blood that contains antibodies, with the aim of detecting the body’s immune response to pathogens. Serology provides us with the clearest window we have onto the landscape of susceptibility to pathogens across human populations, and the consequent risk of outbreaks. A World Serology Bank would shed light on the global risk of infectious disease outbreaks, and would be of tremendous public health benefit.

Why do you feel it is important to address this issue now?

With the emergence of pathogens like Zika virus, it becomes ever more important to understand what enhances or limits the global spread of these pathogens, and what the consequences of such spread may be across our pathogen communities. A World Serology Bank would provide a powerful mechanism toward such a global perspective.

What are the challenges involved in creating the Bank?

Challenges range from developing systems for collecting fluids, which can be done on a regular schedule or during specific disease events, to methods for sera storage and sera testing. Other challenges include defining who will administer the World Serology Bank, and what global data-sharing agreements will be put in place. Finally, we will need to develop new methods to translate what we learn from the evaluation of sera, such as patterns of susceptibility to specific pathogens, or protection from those pathogens. These methods will be driven by the underlying biology, and are likely to require an array of analytical innovations.

Read more

The article, “Use of serological surveys to generate key insights into the changing global landscape of infectious disease,” by C. Jessica E Metcalf, Jeremy Farrar, Felicity T. Cutts, Nicole E. Basta, Andrea L. Graham, Justin Lessler, Neil M. Ferguson, Donald S. Burke and Bryan T. Grenfell was published online in the journal The Lancet on April 5, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(16)30164-7.

 

Group living: For baboons intermediate size is optimal (PNAS)

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella
New research reveals that intermediate-sized groups of baboons (50 to 70 individuals) exhibit optimal ranging behavior and low stress levels. Pictured is a group of wild baboons in East Africa. Credit: Beth Archie
New research reveals that intermediate-sized groups of baboons (50 to 70 individuals) exhibit optimal ranging behavior and low stress levels. Pictured is a group of wild baboons in East Africa. Credit: Beth Archie

By Gregory Filiano, Stony Brook University

Living with others can offer tremendous benefits for social animals, including primates, but these benefits could come at a high cost. New research from a project that originated at Princeton University reveals that intermediate-sized groups provide the most benefits to wild baboons. The study, led by Catherine Markham at Stony Brook University and published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers new insight into the costs and benefits of group living.

In the paper titled “Optimal group size in a highly social mammal,” the authors reveal that while wild baboon groups range in size from 20 to 100 members, groups consisting of about 50 to 70 individuals (intermediate size) exhibit optimal ranging behavior and low physiological stress levels in individual baboons, which translates to a social environment that fosters the health and well-being of individual members. The finding provides novel empirical support for an ongoing theory in the fields of evolutionary biology and anthropology that in living intermediate-sized groups has advantages for social mammals.

“Strikingly, we found evidence that intermediate-sized groups have energetically optimal space-use strategies and both large and small groups experience ranging disadvantages,” said Markham, lead author and an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University. “It appears that large, socially dominant groups are constrained by within-group competition whereas small, socially subordinate groups are constrained by between-group competition and/or predation pressures.”

The researchers compiled their findings based on observing five social wild baboon groups in East Africa over 11 years. This population of wild baboons has been studied continuously for over 40 years by the Amboseli Baboon Research Project. They observed and examined the effects of group size and ranging patterns for all of the groups. To gauge stress levels of individuals, they measured the glucocorticoid (stress hormone) levels found in individual waste droppings.

“The combination of an 11-year data set and more intensive short-term data, together with the levels of stress hormones, led to the important finding that there really is a cost to living in too small a group,” said Jeanne Altmann, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Emeritus and a senior scholar at Princeton University. Altmann is a co-director of the Amboseli Baboon Research Project and co-founded the project in 1971 with Stuart Altmann, a senior scholar in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton.

“The cost of living in smaller groups is a concern from a conservation perspective,” Jeanne Altmann said, “Due to the fragmentation of animal habitats, many animals will be living in smaller groups. Understanding these dynamics is one of the next things to study.” The research was supported primarily by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Aging.

Markham, who earned her Ph.D. at Princeton University in 2012 with Jeanne Altmann as her thesis adviser, explained that regarding optimal group sizes for highly social species the key to the analysis is how are trade-offs balanced, and do these trade-offs actually result in an optimal group size for a social species.

She said that their findings provide a testable hypothesis for evaluating group-size constraints in other group-living species, in which the costs of intra- and intergroup competition vary as a function of group size. Additionally, their findings provide implications for new research and a broader understanding of both why some animals live with others and how many neighbors will be best for various species and situations.

The research was conducted in collaboration with Susan Alberts, a professor of biology at Duke University and co-director of the Amboseli Baboon Research Project, and with Laurence Gesquiere, a former postdoctoral researcher at Princeton who is now a senior research scientist working with Alberts. Altmann and Alberts are also affiliated with the Institute for Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya.

Additional support was provided by the American Society of Primatologists, the Animal Behavior Society, the International Primatological Society, and Sigma Xi.

Article courtesy of Stony Brook University.

Read the abstract.

A. Catherine Markham, Laurence R. Gesquiere, Susan C. Alberts and Jeanne Altmann. Optimal group size in a highly social mammal. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published online before print October 26, 2015, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1517794112 PNAS October 26, 2015

When less is more: Death in moderation boosts population density in nature (Trends in Ecology and Evolution)

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella
A study by Princeton researchers and European colleagues found that the positive effect that mortality can have on populations depends on the size and developmental stage of the creatures that die. The finding could aid the management of wildlife and fish such as the Atlantic cod (Image source: NOAA).
A study by Princeton researchers and European colleagues found that the positive effect that mortality can have on populations depends on the size and developmental stage of the creatures that die. The finding could aid the management of wildlife and fish such as Atlantic cod (Image source: NOAA).

By Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications

In nature, the right amount of death at the right time might actually help boost a species’ population density, according to new research that could help in understanding animal populations, pest control and managing fish and wildlife stocks.

In a paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, a Princeton University researcher and European colleagues conclude that the kind of positive population effect an overall species experiences from a loss of individuals, or mortality, depends on the size and developmental stage of the creatures that die.

If many juveniles perish, more adults are freed up to reproduce, but if more adults die, the number of juveniles that mature will increase because density dependence is relaxed, explained co-author Anieke van Leeuwen, a postdoctoral researcher in Princeton’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Van Leeuwen worked with first author Arne Schröder, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, and Tom Cameron, a lecturer in aquatic community ecology at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom.

This dynamic wherein the loss of individuals in one developmental stage translates to more robust individuals in another stage can be important to managing wildlife, pests or resource stocks, van Leeuwen said. For instance, targeting the adults of an invasive insect could have a counterproductive effect of making more food available to growing larvae, she said.

“It doesn’t matter which developmental stage you target, if you impose mortality on one you will get overcompensation on the opposite end of the size range,” van Leeuwen said. “This effect can be especially advantageous in situations where we want to manage resources we want to harvest. Knowing that there are potential effects that result in an increase in that segment of the population we want to encourage is highly relevant.”

At a certain point, of course, mortality becomes too high and the species as a whole declines, the researchers report.

The researchers compared existing theoretical and experimental work on the effect of mortality on population density to resolve various inconsistencies between the two. Existing mathematical models have predicted this phenomenon, and laboratory and field studies have shown that the effect holds true for a variety of animal species.

Many ecological theories and models, however, have ignored differences in body size and development, and predicted that a modest amount of mortality would result in an increase in the total number of individuals, the researchers wrote. On the other hand, experiments have predominantly shown — along with certain models — that mortality has a positive effect within certain life stages or size classes. The researchers concluded that the overlap of experimental and theoretical data indicates that the benefit of mortality is likely divided by developmental stage. In addition, the number of species in which the phenomenon has been observed makes it commonplace in the natural world.

This work was supported by the Journal of Experimental Biology; the Swedish Research Council and the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries; the University of Leeds, the National Environment Research Council (grant no. NE/C510467/1) and the European Commission Intra-European Fellowship (FANTISIZE, #275873); and the National Science Foundation (grant no. 1115838).

Read the abstract.

Citation: Schröder, Arne, Anieke van Leeuwen, Thomas C. Cameron. 2014. When less is more: Positive population-level effects of mortality. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Published in November 2014 edition: Vol. 29, issue 11, pp. 614–624. DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2014.08.006

Too many chefs: Smaller groups exhibit more accurate decision-making (Proceedings of the Royal Society B)

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella
Flock behavior
Smaller groups actually tend to make more accurate decisions, according to a new study from Princeton University Professor Iain Couzin and graduate student Albert Kao. (Photo credit: Gabriel Miller)

By Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications

The trope that the likelihood of an accurate group decision increases with the abundance of brains involved might not hold up when a collective faces a variety of factors — as often happens in life and nature. Instead, Princeton University researchers report that smaller groups actually tend to make more accurate decisions, while larger assemblies may become excessively focused on only certain pieces of information.

The findings present a significant caveat to what is known about collective intelligence, or the “wisdom of crowds,” wherein individual observations — even if imperfect — coalesce into a single, accurate group decision. A classic example of crowd wisdom is English statistician Sir Francis Galton’s 1907 observation of a contest in which villagers attempted to guess the weight of an ox. Although not one of the 787 estimates was correct, the average of the guessed weights was a mere one-pound short of the animal’s recorded heft. Along those lines, the consensus has been that group decisions are enhanced as more individuals have input.

But collective decision-making has rarely been tested under complex, “realistic” circumstances where information comes from multiple sources, the Princeton researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In these scenarios, crowd wisdom peaks early then becomes less accurate as more individuals become involved, explained senior author Iain Couzin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

“This is an extension of the wisdom-of-crowds theory that allows us to relax the assumption that being in big groups is always the best way to make a decision,” Couzin said.

“It’s a starting point that opens up the possibility of capturing collective decision-making in a more realistic environment,” he said. “When we do see small groups of animals or organisms making decisions they are not necessarily compromising accuracy. They might actually do worse if more individuals were involved. I think that’s the new insight.”

Couzin and first author Albert Kao, a graduate student of ecology and evolutionary biology in Couzin’s group, created a theoretical model in which a “group” had to decide between two potential food sources. The group’s decision accuracy was determined by how well individuals could use two types of information: One that was known to all members of the group — known as correlated information — and another that was perceived by only some individuals, or uncorrelated information. The researchers found that the communal ability to pool both pieces of information into a correct, or accurate, decision was highest in a band of five to 20. After that, the accurate decision increasingly eluded the expanding group.

At work, Kao said, was the dynamic between correlated and uncorrelated cues. With more individuals, that which is known by all members comes to dominate the decision-making process. The uncorrelated information gets drowned out, even if individuals within the group are still well aware of it.

In smaller groups, on the other hand, the lesser-known cues nonetheless earn as much consideration as the more common information. This is due to the more random nature of small groups, which is known as “noise” and typically seen as an unwelcome distraction. Couzin and Kao, however, found that noise is surprisingly advantageous in these smaller arrangements.

“It’s surprising that noise can enhance the collective decision,” Kao said. “The typical assumption is that the larger the group, the greater the collective intelligence.

“We found that if you increase group size, you see the wisdom-of-crowds benefit, but if the group gets too large there is an over-reliance on high-correlation information,” he said. “You would find yourself in a situation where the group uses that information to the point that it dominates the group’s decision-making.”

None of this is to suggest that large groups would benefit from axing members, Couzin said. The size threshold he and Kao found corresponds with the number of individuals making the decisions, not the size of the group overall. The researchers cite numerous studies — including many from Couzin’s lab — showing that decisions in animal groups such as schools of fish can often fall to a select few members. Thusly, these organisms can exhibit highly coordinated movements despite vast numbers of individuals. (Such hierarchies could help animals realize a dual benefit of efficient decision-making and defense via strength-in-numbers, Kao said.)

“What’s important is the number of individuals making the decision,” Couzin said. “Just looking at group size per se is not necessarily relevant. It depends on the number of individuals making the decision.”

Read the abstract.

Kao, Albert B., Iain D. Couzin. 2014. Decision accuracy in complex environments is often maximized by small group sizes. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Article published online April 23, 2014. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.3305

This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement (grant no. 1210029), the National Science Foundation (grant no. PHY-0848755), the Office of Naval Research Award (no. N00014-09-1-1074), the Human Frontier Science Project (grant no. RGP0065/2012), the Army Research Office (grant no. W911NG-11-1-0385), and an NSF EAGER grant (no. IOS-1251585).

From dark hearts comes the kindness of mankind (Evolution)

Posted on by Catherine Zandonella

By Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications

The kindness of mankind most likely developed from our more sinister and self-serving tendencies, according to Princeton University and University of Arizona research that suggests society’s rules against selfishness are rooted in the very exploitation they condemn.

The report in the journal Evolution proposes that altruism — society’s protection of resources and the collective good by punishing “cheaters” — did not develop as a reaction to avarice. Instead, communal disavowal of greed originated when competing selfish individuals sought to control and cancel out one another. Over time, the direct efforts of the dominant fat cats to contain a few competitors evolved into a community-wide desire to guard its own well-being.

The study authors propose that a system of greed dominating greed was simply easier for our human ancestors to manage. In this way, the work challenges dominant theories that selfish and altruistic social arrangements formed independently — instead the two structures stand as evolutionary phases of group interaction, the researchers write.

Second author Andrew Gallup, a former Princeton postdoctoral researcher in ecology and evolutionary biology now a visiting assistant professor of psychology at Bard College, worked with first author Omar Eldakar, a former Arizona postdoctoral fellow now a visiting assistant professor of biology at Oberlin College, and William Driscoll, an ecology and evolutionary biology doctoral student at Arizona.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers constructed a simulation model that gauged how a community withstands a system built on altruistic punishment, or selfish-on-selfish punishment. The authors found that altruism demands a lot of initial expenditure for the group — in terms of communal time, resources and risk of reprisal from the punished — as well as advanced levels of cognition and cooperation.

On the other hand, a construct in which a few profligate players keep like-minded individuals in check involves only those members of the community — everyone else can passively enjoy the benefits of fewer people taking more than their share. At the same time, the reigning individuals enjoy uncontested spoils and, in some cases, reverence.

Social orders maintained by those who bend the rules play out in nature and human history, the authors note: Tree wasps that police hives to make sure that no member other than the queen lays eggs will often lay illicit eggs themselves. Cancer cells will prevent other tumors from forming. Medieval knights would pillage the same civilians they readily defended from invaders, while neighborhoods ruled by the Italian Mafia traditionally had the lowest levels of crime.

What comes from these arrangements, the researchers conclude, is a sense of order and equality that the group eventually takes upon itself to enforce, thus giving rise to altruism.

Read the abstract.

Eldakar, O. T., Gallup, A. C. and Driscoll, W. W. (2013), When Hawks Give Rise To Doves: The Evolution and Transition of Enforcement Strategies. Evolution. doi: 10.1111/evo.12031

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health.