Biological aging is near-ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, but its timing and pace vary between individuals and over lifespans. Prospective, individual-based studies of wild animals—especially non-human primates—help identify the social and environmental drivers of this variation by indicating the conditions and exposure windows that affect aging processes. However, measuring individual biological age in wild primates is chall...

Summary Gut bacterial communities play essential roles in host biology, but to date we lack information on the forces that shape gut microbiota between hosts and over time in natural populations. Understanding these forces in wild primates provides a valuable comparative context that enriches scientific perspectives on human gut microbiota. To this end, we tested predictors of gut microbial composition in a well‐studied popula...

Genetic tools are increasingly valuable for understanding the behaviour, evolution, and conservation of social species. In African elephants, for instance, genetic data provide basic information on the population genetic causes and consequences of social behaviour, and how human activities alter elephants’ social and genetic structures. As such, African elephants provide a useful case study to understand the relationships betw...

Nonrandom patterns of mating and dispersal create fine‐scale genetic structure in natural populations — especially of social mammals — with important evolutionary and conservation genetic consequences. Such structure is well‐characterized for typical mammalian societies; that is, societies where social group composition is stable, dispersal is male‐biased, and males form permanent breeding associations in just one or a few soc...

The costs of inbreeding depression, as well as the opportunity costs of inbreeding avoidance, determine whether and which mechanisms of inbreeding avoidance evolve. In African elephants, sex‐biased dispersal does not lead to the complete separation of male and female relatives, and so individuals may experience selection to recognize kin and avoid inbreeding. However, because estrous females are rare and male–male competition...