Metabotropic glutamate receptor subtype 7 controls maternal care,maternal motivation and maternal aggression in mice

The group III metabotropic glutamate receptor subtype 7 (mGlu7) is an important regulator of glutamatergic and GABAergic neurotransmission and known to mediate emotionality and male social behavior. However, a possible regulatory role in maternal behavior remains unknown to date. Adequate expression of maternal behavior is essential for successful rearing and healthy development of the young. By understanding genetic and neural mechanisms underlying this important prosocial behavior, we gain valuable insights into possible dysregulations. Using genetic ablation as well as pharmacological modulation, we studied various parameters of maternal behavior in two different mouse strains under the influence of mGlu7. We can clearly show a regulatory role of mGlu7 in maternal behavior. Naïve virgin female C57BL/6 mGlu7 knockout mice showed more often nursing postures and less spontaneous maternal aggression compared to their heterozygous and wildtype littermates. In lactating C57BL/6 wildtype mice, acute central activation of mGlu7 by the selective agonist AMN082 reduced arched back nursing and accelerated pup retrieval without affecting maternal aggression. In addition, in lactating CD1 wildtype mice the selective mGlu7 antagonist XAP044 increased both pup retrieval and maternal aggression. With respect to receptor expression levels, mGlu7 mRNA expression was higher in lactating vs virgin C57BL/6 mice in the prefrontal cortex, but not hypothalamus or hippocampus. In conclusion, these findings highlight a significant role of the mGlu7 receptor subtype in mediating maternal behavior in mice. Region‐dependent studies are warranted to further extend our knowledge on the specific function of the brain glutamate system in maternal behavior.     

The role of cross-border transhumance in influencing resident herders’ cattle husbandry practices and use of genetic resources

For centuries, the humid West African coastal country of Benin attracts cattle herders from neighboring Sahelian countries such as Niger, Burkina Faso and Nigeria. Each year, several thousands of cattle are trekked over hundreds of kilometers to Benin following established and non-established transhumance corridors. This cross-border mobility has been shown to play an important role in ensuring the productivity of the transhumant herds through adequate late dry season access to pastoral resources. Yet, its effects on the traditional agro-pastoral production systems that are encountered along the routes in Benin have never been explicitly investigated. Therefore, we collected socio-economic household data, herd characteristics and management data from 104 resident herders and 38 transhumant herders in 2 vegetation zones of Benin. To determine whether or not the proximity to transhumance corridors affects sedentary production systems, characteristics of cattle herds and farmers’ management practices were compared between villages close to (within a 25 km buffer) and far from (outside a 25 km buffer) transhumance corridors within and between vegetation zones using non-parametric statistical tests. Existing relationships between resident and transhumant herders were also identified and characterized. Subsequently, herd characteristics and management practices were compared between resident herders having relationships with transhumant herders and those without. Herd sizes of resident herders living close to transhumance corridors were larger (P < 0.01) than those of their counterparts living far away. Also, proximity to transhumance corridors had positive effects on herd management practices. The relationships between resident and transhumant herders were governed by a variety of interests including encampment/manuring contracts, exploitation of grazing lands and watering points, trading and bartering of cattle. This exchange of cattle is an important driver of change in the breed composition of local herds and represents an opportunity for resident herders to enhance their herds’ productivity through crossbreeding. However, the mere replacement or indiscriminate crossbreeding of local cattle breeds with those kept by transhumant herders threatens the sustainability of the traditional resident herding systems by increasing the risk of genetic erosion and loss of valuable adaptive traits in indigenous animal genetic resources.     

The evolution of eusociality: no risk‐return tradeoff but the ecology matters

The origin of eusociality in the Hymenoptera is a question of major interest. Theory has tended to focus on genetic relatedness, but ecology can be just as important a determinant of whether eusociality evolves. Using the model of Fu et al. (2015), we show how ecological assumptions critically affect the conclusions drawn. Fu et al. inferred that eusociality rarely evolves because it faces a fundamental ‘risk‐return tradeoff’. The intuitive logic was that worker production represents an opportunity cost because it delays realising a reproductive payoff. However, making empirically justified assumptions that (1) workers take over egg‐laying following queen death and (2) productivity increases gradually with each additional worker, we find that the risk‐return tradeoff disappears. We then survey Hymenoptera with more specialised morphological castes, and show how the interaction between two common features of eusociality – saturating birth rates and group size‐dependent helping decisions – can determine whether eusociality outperforms other strategies.     

Communicative roots of complex sociality and cognition

Mammals living in more complex social groups typically have large brains for their body size and many researchers have proposed that the primary driver of the increase in brain size through primate and hominin evolution was the selection pressures associated with sociality. Many mammals, and especially primates, use flexible signals that show a high degree of voluntary control and these signals may play an important role in forming and maintaining social relationships between group members. However, the specific role that cognitive skills play in this complex communication, and how in turn this relates to sociality, is still unclear. The hypothesis for the communicative roots of complex sociality and cognition posits that cognitive demands behind the communication needed to form and maintain bonded social relationships in complex social settings drives the link between brain size and sociality. We review the evidence in support of this hypothesis and why key features of cognitively complex communication such as intentionality and referentiality should be more effective in forming and maintaining bonded relationships as compared with less cognitively complex communication. Exploring the link between cognition, communication and sociality provides insights into how increasing flexibility in communication can facilitate the emergence of social systems characterised by bonded social relationships, such as those found in non‐human primates and humans. To move the field forward and carry out both within‐ and among‐species comparisons, we advocate the use of social network analysis, which provides a novel way to describe and compare social structure. Using this approach can lead to a new, systematic way of examining social and communicative complexity across species, something that is lacking in current comparative studies of social structure.     

Could 2021–2030 be the decade to couple new human values with ecological restoration? Valuable insights and actions are emerging from the Colombian Amazon

Looking ahead to the United Nations' 2021–2030 Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, we would like to ponder and discuss two fundamental goals to improve, mainstream, and scale up ecological restoration. The first is to cultivate alternative visions of the human dimension in relation to ecological restoration and other restorative activities. The second is to develop shared protocols for planning, revamping, and monitoring the progress of social goals related to ecological restoration within the social construction theoretical framework, based on three interrelated dimensions: stakeholder‐based problem definition, social representations, and legitimation. We draw on ongoing work in Caquetá (Colombian Amazonia) to consider how these dimensions may be incorporated into tangible restoration practices. Caquetá is facing the highest deforestation rates in the Amazonian region due to a highly volatile sociopolitical context and recent armed conflicts that have claimed thousands of victims to date. We conclude that the work in Caquetá demonstrates a process of social construction that effectively couples new human values with ecological restoration. Our work also provides evidence that the human dimension of restoration is a central issue in the restoration of human, social, and ecosystem health and must be integrated into the framework of the coming Decade of Ecosystem Restoration.     

The integrative value of conflict and dispute: Implications for defining community in the native title context

Claimants and industry professionals frequently view conflict that arises in the course of a native title claim as a detriment to timely claims resolution. I argue instead that disputation itself may constitute an integrative social process through which participants define, delimit and reproduce community. I show also how ethnographic analysis of disputation can provide useful insights into broader social and cultural practices and normative value systems. Drawing on theoretical and methodological concerns with human agency and the integrative and constitutive role of conflict that challenges consensus models of community, I develop a practice‐centred approach that is attentive to the ways that participants in a dispute articulate and contest the definition of community. The possibility of viewing 'culture' and group cohesion as contingent and emergent through disputation should assist anthropologists working in the native title field to incorporate conflict as a productive aspect of social and cultural practice.     

A chemically triggered transition from conflict to cooperation in burying beetles

Although interspecific competition has long been recognised as a major driver of trait divergence and adaptive evolution, relatively little effort has focused on how it influences the evolution of intraspecific cooperation. Here we identify the mechanism by which the perceived pressure of interspecific competition influences the transition from intraspecific conflict to cooperation in a facultative cooperatively breeding species, the Asian burying beetle Nicrophorus nepalensis. We not only found that beetles are more cooperative at carcasses when blowfly maggots have begun to digest the tissue, but that this social cooperation appears to be triggered by a single chemical cue – dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) – emitted from carcasses consumed by blowflies, but not from control carcasses lacking blowflies. Our results provide experimental evidence that interspecific competition promotes the transition from intraspecific conflict to cooperation in N. nepalensis via a surprisingly simple social chemical cue that is a reliable indicator of resource competition between species.     

玉米转基因技术专利权人合作态势分析

转基因玉米是最重要的转基因主粮作物之一,其转基因技术具有一定的代表性。为了更好地了解和掌握玉米转基因技术领域研发主体合作情况,文章构建了基于专利权人合作网络的目标技术领域专利权人合作态势分析框架,并基于社会网络分析方法与技术,以世界范围内的转基因玉米领域的重要专利权人为分析对象,构建合作网络、分析整体合作特征、挖掘合作子网、探测领域内重要专利权人,从而从宏观、中观和微观三个层面客观展现玉米转基因技术领域专利权人合作态势,为科技战略规划提供一定的决策支撑。     

Bonds of bros and brothers: Kinship and social bonding in postdispersal male macaques

Group‐living animals often maintain a few very close affiliative relationships—social bonds—that can buffer them against many of the inevitable costs of gregariousness. Kinship plays a central role in the development of such social bonds. The bulk of research on kin biases in sociality has focused on philopatric females, who typically live in deeply kin‐structured systems, with matrilineal dominance rank inheritance and life‐long familiarity between kin. Closely related males, in contrast, are usually not close in rank or familiar, which offers the opportunity to test the importance of kinship per se in the formation of social bonds. So far, however, kin biases in male social bonding have only been tested in philopatric males, where familiarity remains a confounding factor. Here, we studied bonds between male Assamese macaques, a species in which males disperse from their natal groups and in which male bonds are known to affect fitness. Combining extensive behavioural data on 43 adult males over a 10‐year period with DNA microsatellite relatedness analyses, we find that postdispersal males form stronger relationships with the few close kin available in the group than with the average nonkin. However, males form the majority of their bonds with nonkin and may choose nonkin over available close kin to bond with. Our results show that kinship facilitates bond formation, but is not a prerequisite for it, which suggests that strong bonds are not restricted to kin in male mammals and that animals cooperate for both direct and indirect fitness benefits.