Animal Socializes Less As They Grow Older

“Overall, there seems to be a general trend that people become less sociable with age.” These words of Josh Firth, an ecology researcher at the University of Leeds, in England, quoted by The Guardian, do not only concern humans. Many other animals, belonging to very varied species – deer, sparrows, rhesus macaques,
among others – would experience the same thing.
This is what the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences suggests. Its latest special edition, published on October 28 and of which Josh Firth is the editor, explores, through 16 scientific publications, the way in which the aging of certain populations of animals influences their social behavior and the consequences of this on the structure and functioning of society. “By integrating knowledge from evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, and demography, these studies reveal how age shapes an individual’s social connections and how this influences their health and fitness,” the journal explains.
Avoiding infections The idea is to see if this better knowledge of animals can shed light on human behavior,
but also deepen our understanding of aging in so-called natural societies. The advantage, says Josh Firth, who is also a co-author of one of these studies on wild ungulates, is that “scientists can often follow animals throughout their lives and conduct experiments—which is difficult in humans.” According to him, it is possible that older individuals are less socially connected because they don’t need to share information in the same way as younger ones. While this decline in social relationships is often seen as a negative,
at least in humans, it can be beneficial. Several studies suggest, for example, that this “unsociability”
would help avoid infections – which is important since the response