ArticleEcology letters2025
A Natural Disaster Exacerbates and Redistributes Disease Risk Among Free-Ranging Macaques by Altering Social Structure.
Article in Ecology letters, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sociability Under Anthropogenic Change: From Individual Behaviour to Population-Level Consequences.Ecology and evolution · 2026Review
- Host-Microbiome Interactions as Moderators of Host Quality and Biodiversity-Disease Relationships.Integrative and comparative biology · 2025Review
- The biology of aging in a social world: Insights from free-ranging rhesus macaques.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
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8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Climate change is intensifying extreme weather events, with severe implications for ecosystem dynamics. A key behavioural mechanism whereby animals may cope with such events is by altering their social structure, which in turn could influence epidemic risk. However, how and to what extent natural disasters affect disease risk via changes in sociality remains unexplored in animal populations. By simulating disease spread in free-living rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) before and after a hurricane, we demonstrate doubled pathogen transmission rates up to 5 years following the disaster, equivalent to an increase in pathogen infectivity from 10% to 20%. Moreover, the hurricane redistributed the risk of infection across the population by exacerbating sex-related differences. Overall, we demonstrate that natural disasters can amplify and redistribute epidemic risk in animals via changes in sociality. These observations provide unexpected further mechanisms by which extreme weather events can threaten wildlife health, population viability and spillover to humans.
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