Neuroethology of sociality and its role in environmental resilience

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.