Understanding how parasites and pathogens move within and between social groups of wild animals is a key question in animal behavior, and the answer has clear practical value. For instance, knowing how social behavior shapes patterns of disease transmission is useful for fighting the spread of disease in wildlife. In addition, socially-structured transmission helps explain why some animals are more infected than others, which is useful for predicting disease risks for individual animals, or understanding the evolutionary costs and benefits of social behavior. To date, research on this topic has been limited by the fact that it is difficult to track the movements of disease-causing organisms in wildlife populations. This project solves this problem by using genetic tools to map the movements of common infectious organisms onto the social landscape of five, well-studied baboon groups in Amboseli National Park, Kenya. The results will provide a detailed picture of how different infectious organisms move between and within social groups, and how these movements influence an individual?s risk of becoming infected. This project also provides educational opportunities for students at the high school, college, and graduate level. Specifically, the project will help train graduate students in the US and Kenya, and it supports a collaborative, educational filmmaking project with high school students and teachers in Indiana. In this collaboration, students will use video footage of the baboons and researchers at the field site in Kenya, to create short documentaries about baboons and the proposed research. In the process, students will learn about real biological research and how to communicate scientific ideas to a wide audience. The best films will be shown to other high school students in Indiana and at the field site in Kenya.
