Abstract
Air pollution is a global environmental problem, and its effects on human behavior, psychology, and health have been well studied. However, very few studies were done on if and how air pollution affects animal behavior, for example, social conflict. Many physiological and psychological evidences suggest a possible positive relationship between air pollution and animal social conflict, thus we established a multiple linear regression model using a captive monkey group to explore if monkeys behave more aggressively in polluted air. Our results confirmed that daily social fighting behaviors occurred more when air is polluted. Temperature has a nonlinear effect on monkey social conflict, with a fighting peak at 25–29 °C. To our knowledge, this is the first report that animal social conflict, like humans, is also affected by air pollution and temperature.
Highlights
Air pollution is a global environmental problem, and its effects on human behavior, psychology, and health have been well studied
Air pollution harms human health and affects human behavior, in long-run, it can increase the incidences of heart disease, lung cancer, and high blood pressure[7,9]; in short-run, it can impair human cognition, induce avoidance behavior, and cause psychological abnormality[10,11,12]
Ozone is an active substance that can react with molecules in the body to create toxins. It can trigger an inflammatory response in the central nervous system, and there are many studies documenting that neuroinflammation can trigger increased aggression, impulsivity and depression[25,26]
Summary
Air pollution is a global environmental problem, and its effects on human behavior, psychology, and health have been well studied. Very few studies were done on if and how air pollution affects animal behavior, for example, social conflict. Temperature has a nonlinear effect on monkey social conflict, with a fighting peak at 25–29 °C To our knowledge, this is the first report that animal social conflict, like humans, is affected by air pollution and temperature. Many studies have documented adverse effects of air pollution on a wide range of outcomes of humans including health, behavior, physiology and psychology in the shortand long-run[6,7,8]. We video-monitored all the 90 individuals and collected one year round data of social fighting behavior, to explore whether and how air pollution, as well as other environmental factors, affect the social conflict of these monkeys. Our prediction is daily social fighting behaviors would increase as a response to more polluted air and higher temperature
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