Good health and well-being in primate are dependent on social connections. There is growing evidence that the gut-brain axis plays a key role in our physical and mental health.
How does social connection affect the composition and diversity of the gut microbiome. There is a new study on rhesus macaques.
Katerina Johnson is a research associate at the Department of Experimental Psychology and the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Oxford.
There's a monkey island.
There are 22 males and 16 females between the ages of six and 20 years on the island of Cayo Santiago, off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. Macaques used to live in North Africa and Asia. The founding population of 409 rhesus macaques was relocated from India to Cayo Santiago. More than 1000 macaques live on a 15.2hectare island, divided into several social groups. Their diet is supplemented with monkey chow every day. The monkeys are observed by researchers every year.
The authors collected 50 stool samples from this group over the course of two years. They used the time each monkey spent grooming or being groomed in 2012 and 2013 as a measure of social connectedness.
Social grooming is done by people.
The Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder is where the co-author is from.
The team analyzed the data from the stool samples to measure the composition and diversity of the community. Sex, age, season, and rank were taken into account. They focused on the microbes that have been shown to be more or less abundant in people who are socially deprived, or in rodents who have been shown to be more or less abundant in the same way.
There are more good microbes in sociable monkeys.
The co-author from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford said that engagement in social interactions was positively related to the abundance of certain gut microbes with beneficial immunological functions.
Faecalibacterium and Prevotella were more abundant in the most social monkeys. Streptococcus, which can cause diseases in humans, was most abundant in monkeys.
There is a strong positive relationship between the abundance of the gut microbe Faecalibacterium and how the animals communicate. It's known for its anti- inflammatory properties and is associated with good health.
Is the cause and effect true?
There is a relationship between social connectedness and the composition of the gut. It's not easy to distinguish between causes and effects.
Social transmission of microbes may be the cause of the relationship between social behavior and abundances. It could be an indirect effect, as monkeys with fewer friends may be more stressed and thus less productive. The brain and behavior can be influenced by the microbiome as well as by behavior.
As our society is substituting online interactions for real-life ones, these important research findings underscore the fact that as primates, we evolved not only in a social world.
There is a correlation between sociability in a macaque population and beneficial gutbacteria. The full article can be found at www.frontiersin.org.
Journal information: Frontiers in Microbiology
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