Neuroethology of sociality and its role in environmental resilience
- Date: Jul 23, 2025
- Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Camille Testard
- Harvard Society of Fellows, Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology
- Location: MPI BI Martinsried
- Room: MPIBI, Seminar room NQ 105
- Host: Daniela Vallentin
- Contact: daniela.vallentin@bi.mpg.de

When a catastrophic hurricane decimated over 60% of vegetation on a
Caribbean island, a resident population of rhesus macaques responded in a
surprising way. Rather than intensifying competition, they adopted a more
tolerant social strategy, significantly expanding their social networks.
Remarkably, individuals capable of enhancing their social connections exhibited
higher survival rates. These findings suggest that social flexibility plays a
crucial role in resilience against increasingly frequent and severe
climate-driven environmental disasters. But what enables macaques to rapidly
adapt their social interactions under extreme conditions? Employing single-unit
neural recordings in freely-moving, socially interacting macaques uncovers a
distributed neural representation of social dynamics. Specifically, neurons
within the inferotemporal and prefrontal cortex actively encode a spectrum of
social information, ranging from identifying neighboring individuals, social
support during aggressive encounters, to monitoring reciprocity in established,
stable relationships. Collectively, these findings lay essential groundwork in
primate neuroethology, connecting flexible and complex primate social behaviors
observed in naturalistic settings directly to their neural basis. Current and
future work in rodents aims to unravel the neural circuits responsible for
rapid and adaptive social responses to ecological disturbances—mechanisms
crucial for survival in rapidly shifting environments.