Sex, Violence and Simian viruses

James Lester

What?

  • Looking at the viruses of a red colobus population living within Kibale National Park
  • Considering SIV, SFV, SPgV, SHFV1 and SHFV2
  • Access to a combination of demographic, viral presence/absence, behavioural and sequence data (which match up to varying degrees)

Why? (Academic)

  • Whilst we're very aware of the existence and zoonotic potential of viruses such as SIV and SFV, we still know relatively little of their wildlife dynamics
  • Various studies have approached single viruses in the past, but typically very "disconnected" overall
  • Faecal virological data alone, occasionally with age, maternal relations, or dominance hierarchy

Why? (General)

  • Primate zoonoses remain a concern - Precedent set by SIV, albeit with this clearly indicated to be a rare consequence likely borne of an unusual set of circumstances
  • Better understanding how these pathogens behave in the wild may better inform us about if and how they could pose a risk to the human population
  • Also, interesting from a wildlife disease epidemiology perspective

Which?

  • Whilst SIV really should be familiar to you all, others may well be less so
  • Simian Foamy Virus - Retrovirus transmitted through saliva
  • Simian Haemorrhagic Fever Viruses - Arteriviruses transmitted through ???
  • Simian Pegivirus - Flavivirus transmitted maybe through sexual, vertical and parenteral routes

An update on last year

  • LVZ 2015 - Beginning to unpick behavioural dataset
  • Mid 2015 - Viral takeover - Behavioural work drifts away
  • End 2015 - Virus-level analysis "complete"

Virus-level findings, in (very) brief

  • Age-dependent accumulation of all viruses, especially in males
  • Coinfection at the level of viral presence, and sequence co-clustering for the SHFV viruses
  • Detection of viral clusters between siblings for all viruses, between mother-offspring pairs for SHFV2
  • Non-familial clustering between some male-female pairs for SHFV1 + 2
  • Positive correlation between enacting aggressive behaviour in year of sampling (2012) and SHFV infection status

Where next?

  • 3 years of copulatory/agonistic data
  • Alongside 9 years of general behavioural data
  • One-off virus sampling sampling in 2012 + 2010

Synthesising behavioural and virological data

  • 3 years of sociosexual behaviour provide a basis to consider the relationship between grooming interactions, nearest-neighbour interactions and agonism/copulation
  • This can then be expanded into many years of past behaviour

Key aims of this work

  • Identify patterns of associative/affiliative behaviour and demographic factors associated with agonism/copulation
  • Use these to infer past interactions and dominance
  • Compare these to both distribution of infection, and clustering thereof

Useful references

  • Molecular Ecology and Natural History of Simian Foamy Virus Infection in Wild-Living Chimpanzees, Liu et al. 2008
  • Simian Immunodeficiency Virus Infection in Free-Ranging Sooty Mangabeys (Cercocebus atys atys) from the Tai Forest, Cote d'Ivoire: Implications for the Origin of Epidemic Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 2, Santiago et al. 2005
  • Familiarity and dominance relations among female sooty mangabeys in the Tai National Park, Range et al. 2002