Valéria Romano

• PhD in Ecology and Animal Behaviour
• Permanent researcher at Research Institute for Development (IRD)

Social information and socially transmitted pathogens are governed by social structure, and also shape social interactions. However, information and infection are rarely investigated as interactive factors driving social evolution. We propose exactly such an integrative framework, drawing attention to mechanisms of social phenotypic plasticity for...

Disease outbreaks can severely affect populations in the wild. However, their consequences on individual social behaviour and population demography are poorly understood. We used a multi-site capture-recapture model to investigate the impacts of a yellow fever outbreak on the endangered golden lion tamarin Leontopithecus rosalia, in the highly frag...

Disease outbreaks can severely affect populations in the wild. However, their consequences on individual behaviours are poorly understood. We used a multi-site capture-recapture model to investigate the impacts of a yellow fever outbreak on the endangered golden lion tamarin Leontopithecus rosalia, in the highly fragmented Atlantic forest, Brazil....

Disease outbreaks are one of the key threats to great apes and other wildlife. Because the spread of some pathogens (e.g., respiratory viruses, sexually transmitted diseases, ectoparasites) are mediated by social interactions, there is a growing interest in understanding how social networks predict the chain of pathogen transmission. In this study,...

nhanced survival and reproduction are associated with an individual's direct and indirect social connections with members of a group. Yet, the role of these connections is little known in a vast range of primate species. We studied female Central Himalayan Langur (CHL) to investigate the link between four specific attributes (dominance rank, age, g...

Brazilian biomes hold the highest primate diversity in the world, with many species living in forest fragments close to humans. However, how habitat fragmentation interacts with social connectivity to predict the emergence and spread of infectious diseases is barely known. Our project aims at understanding how infectious diseases emerge in animal p...

Disease outbreaks can severely affect populations in the wild. However, their ecological consequences are poorly understood. Here, we used a multi-site capture-recapture model to investigate the impacts of a yellow fever outbreak on the endangered golden lion tamarin Leontopithecus rosalia, in the Atlantic forest, Brazil. We show that the annual ad...

How interactions between individuals contribute to the emergence of complex societies is a major question in behavioural ecology. Nonetheless, little remains known about the type of immediate social structure (i.e. social network) that emerges from relationships that maximize beneficial interactions (e.g. social attraction towards informed individu...

Network research has recently been adopted as one of the tools of the trade in archaeology, used to study a wide range of topics: interactions between island communities, movements through urban spaces, visibility in past landscapes, material culture similarity, exchange, and much more. This Oxford Handbook is the first authoritative reference work...

Gorilla tourism supports the protection of its ecosystem, benefiting humans and wildlife populations living therein. Assessing to what degree the presence and proximity of tourists affect wildlife aids long‐term benefits. Because wild animals might see human activities as stressors, we hypothesized that the increased presence and proximity of touri...

Identifying how infection modifies host behaviours that determine social contact networks is important for understanding heterogeneity in infectious disease dynamics. Here, we investigate whether group social behaviour is modified during bacterial infection in fruit flies ( Drosophila melanogaster ) according to pathogen species, infectious dose, h...

Archaeologists have been reconstructing interactions amongst hunter-gatherer populations for a long time. These exchangesare materialised in the movements of raw materials and symbolic objects which are found far from their original sources. Social network, i.e. the structure constituted by these interactions, is a well-established concept in archa...

Hunter–gatherers past and present live in complex societies, and the structure of these can be assessed using social networks. We outline how the integration of new evidence from cultural evolution experiments, computer simulations, ethnography, and archaeology open new research horizons to understand the role of social networks in cultural evoluti...

Identifying how infection modifies host behaviours that determine social contact networks is important for understanding heterogeneity in infectious disease dynamics. Here, we investigate whether group social behaviour is modified during bacterial infection in Drosophila melanogaster , an established system for behavioural genetics, according to pa...

Nature-based tourism supports the protection of the mountain gorilla ecosystem, benefiting humans and wildlife populations living therein. Therefore, assessing to what degree the presence and proximity of tourists affect wildlife is important to ensure long-term benefits and to avoid immediate costs, such as the increased risk of pathogen spillover...

Culture is increasingly being framed as a driver of human phenotypes and behaviour. Yet very little is known about variations in the patterns of past social interactions between humans in cultural evolution. The archaeological record, combined with modern evolutionary and analytical approaches, provides a unique opportunity to investigate broad-sca...

Archaeologists have been reconstructing interactions among hunter-gatherer populations for a long time. These exchanges are reflected in the movements of raw materials and symbolic objects which are found far from their original sources. A social network, i.e., the structure constituted by these interactions, is a well-established concept in archae...

Social structure can regulate information and pathogen transmission via social contact or proximity, which ultimately affects individual fitness. In theory, the social relationships that mediate information transmission also favor the spread of socially‐transmitted pathogens, creating a tradeoff between them. However, the mechanisms underlying the...

For a long time, archaeologists have observed the interactions among hunter-gatherers’ population embedded in the movement of raw materials and objects found far from their original sources. The social network, the structure constituted by those interactions, is a well-stablished concept in archaeology to estimate connectivity among hunter-gatherer...

Over the past decade, a major debate has taken place on the underpinnings of cultural changes in human societies. A growing array of evidence in behavioural and evolutionary biology has revealed that social connectivity among populations and within them affects, and is affected by, culture. Yet the interplay between prehistoric hunter–gatherer soci...

Social structure can regulate information and pathogen transmission via social contact or proximity, which ultimately affects individual fitness. In theory, the same network properties that favor social information transmission also favor the spread of socially-transmitted pathogens, creating a trade-off between them. The mechanisms underlying the...

Social networks are a well-established concept in Palaeolithic Archaeology to interpret different degrees of regional and interregional interactions among hunter-gatherer populations. However, the heuristic power of the networks approach has been traditionally biased towards its social dimension, empirically grounded in the reconstruction of exchan...

The study of the social drivers of animal dispersal is key to understanding the evolution of social systems. Among the social drivers of natal emigration, the conspecific attraction, aggressive eviction, and reduced social integration hypotheses predict that sexually mature individuals who receive more aggressive behavior and are engaged in less af...

Since group-living animals are embedded in a network of social interactions, socioecological factors may not only affect individual behavioural strategies but also the patterning of group-level social interactions, i.e. the network structure. These co-variations between socioecological factors, individual behaviour, and group-level structure are im...

In myriad biological systems, multiple lines of evidence indicate that modularity, wherein parts of a network are organized into modules such as subgroups in animal networks, may affect social transmission processes. In animal societies, there is increased interest in understanding variation in the effects of modularity on transmission as it may pr...

Social structure can theoretically regulate information transmission and disease risk via social contact or proximity. In theory, the same network properties that favor information transmission also favor pathogen transmission creating a potential trade-off between them. In my thesis, I used empirical data, network analysis and individual-based mod...

Different hypotheses explain variation in the occurrence of self-directed behaviour such as scratching and self-grooming: a parasite hypothesis linked with ectoparasite load, an environmental hypothesis linked with seasonal conditions and a social hypothesis linked with social factors. These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive but are often consi...

The capacity to use information provided by others to guide behavior is a widespread phenomenon in animal societies. A standard paradigm to test if and/or how animals use and transfer social information is through social diffusion experiments, by which researchers observe how information spreads within a group, sometimes by seeding new behavior in...

Social structure can theoretically regulate disease risk by mediating exposure to pathogens via social proximity and contact. Investigating the role of central individuals within a network may help predict infectious agent transmission as well as implement disease control strategies, but little is known about such dynamics in real primate networks....

Lice are socially-transmitted ectoparasites. Transmission depends upon their host’s degree of contact with conspecifics. While grooming facilitates ectoparasite transmission via body contact, it also constrains their spread through parasite removal. We investigated relations between parasite burden and sociality in female Japanese macaques followin...