Abstract
Although sickness behaviour in response to non-lethal parasites has been documented in wild animals, it remains unclear how social and environmental stress might also shape an animal’s behavioural response to parasitism, nor do we know whether simultaneous infection with more than one parasite changes the way animals respond. Here, we combine physiological, environmental, behavioural and parasite measures to investigate behavioural responses to infection in wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) living in a semi-arid region of South Africa. We quantified both activity budget and behavioural predictability to investigate the occurrence of sickness behaviour and infection with two non-lethal gastrointestinal parasite genera. Higher parasite load was linked to an increase in the time spent resting. However, the nature of the relationship with other behaviours was contingent on both the parasite genus in question and parasite species interacted, highlighting the importance of considering co-infection. Overall, food availability was the dominant predictor of behavioural change suggesting that, for monkeys living in a more extreme environment, coping with ecological stress may override the ability to modulate behaviour in response to other physiological stressors. Our findings provide insight into how animals living in harsh environments find ways to cope with parasite infection, avoidance and transmission.
Significance statement
Sickness behaviour is a suite of behaviours that occur in response to infection that may serve as an adaptive response to cope with infection. For wild animals, the ability to express sickness behaviour will be modulated by the presence of other competing stressors. Hence, the patterns shown are likely to be more complex than under captive conditions, which is where most of our knowledge of sickness behaviour comes from. Using physiological, environmental, behavioural and parasite measures, we demonstrate that although vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) living in a semi-arid region of South Africa do exhibit sickness behaviours, this is contingent on the parasite genus in question. Further, food availability was the dominant predictor of behavioural change suggesting that, for monkeys living in a more extreme environment, coping with severe ecological stress may override the ability to express sickness behaviour in an adaptive fashion.
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Data availability
Data and scripts are available on Zenodo: 10.5281/zenodo.5199490.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the Tompkins family for permission to work at Samara Private Game Reserve and Kitty and Richard Viljoen for logistical support in the field. We are deeply grateful to all volunteer research assistants and students for their ongoing help with data collection and thank Delaney Roth for assisting in focal sampling. We thank the Endocrine Research Laboratory for their help with the laboratory work at UP and Professor Cameron Goater (University of Lethbridge, Canada), who generously provided laboratory space as well as invaluable guidance during the analysis phase. We thank Professor Michael Huffman (Kyoto University) for his invaluable advice during the writing of this manuscript. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their time and valuable contributions to improving this manuscript.
Funding
This work was funded by National Research Foundation (South Africa) awards (SPH), Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grants (LB, SPH), the Canada Research Chairs Program (LB), a Leakey Foundation Franklin Mosher Baldwin Memorial Fellowship (RB) and a Senior Post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Pretoria (CY).
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RB, SPH and LB conceived the ideas and designed the methodology. RB and CY collected the data, and RB, AG and TRB analysed the data. RB, SPH and LB led the writing of the manuscript. All the authors gave approval for publication.
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All data collection protocols were noninvasive and adhered to the laws and guidelines of South Africa and Canada. Procedures were approved by the University of Lethbridge Animal Welfare Committee (Protocols 0702 and 1505). The Tompkins family, owners of the Samara Private Game Reserve, granted permission to conduct the study on their property in South Africa and also approved the study.
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Blersch, R., Bonnell, T.R., Ganswindt, A. et al. Sick and tired: sickness behaviour, polyparasitism and food stress in a gregarious mammal. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 75, 169 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-021-03111-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-021-03111-3