集体活动帮助幼年黑猩猩掌握社交能力，但同时也给传染病的传播造成了便利。
孩子们在托儿所和学校很容易彼此传染呼吸道疾病，黑猩猩群体似乎同样如此：一项最新研究表明，集体游玩促进了呼吸道感染的传播。
德国莱比锡马普进化人类学研究所的科学家亚尔马·屈尔（Hjalmar Kuehl）和彼得·沃尔什（Peter Walsh）主持了一项研究，对象牙海岸塔伊国家公园（Ta National Park）的两个黑猩猩群体进行了检查。研究结果显示，幼年黑猩猩在一起玩耍的时间越久（通常发生在水果大量成熟的季节，此时黑猩猩常聚集在一起），它们死于呼吸系统疾病的概率就越高。两三岁的黑猩猩一天中有18%的时间彼此接触。这段时间是它们的社会交流高峰期，可以巩固群体中所有成员彼此之间的联系。
一旦疾病开始在贪玩的黑猩猩群体中暴发，所有年龄段的幼年个体都难逃一劫。染病死去的小黑猩猩的母亲迅速进入发情期，从而形成了幼儿群体数量增减的三年周期。屈尔表示，加上偷猎、气候变化及天敌捕食等因素，传染病造成的幼年黑猩猩死亡对当地黑猩猩数量造成了重创，他的研究结果发表在2008年6月18日的《公共科学图书馆·综合》（PLoS ONE）杂志中。他还说，近年来只有极少数幼年黑猩猩能够成年，“10只中，只有4只能活到五岁”。（生物谷Bioon.com）
生物谷推荐原始出处：
PLoS ONE 3(6): e2440. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002440
The Price of Play: Self-Organized Infant Mortality Cycles in Chimpanzees
Hjalmar S. Kuehl, Caroline Elzner, Yasmin Moebius, Christophe Boesch, Peter D. Walsh
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
Abstract
Chimpanzees have been used extensively as a model system for laboratory research on infectious diseases. Ironically, we know next to nothing about disease dynamics in wild chimpanzee populations. Here, we analyze long-term demographic and behavioral data from two habituated chimpanzee communities in Ta? National Park, C?te d'Ivoire, where previous work has shown respiratory pathogens to be an important source of infant mortality. In this paper we trace the effect of social connectivity on infant mortality dynamics. We focus on social play which, as the primary context of contact between young chimpanzees, may serve as a key venue for pathogen transmission. Infant abundance and mortality rates at Ta? cycled regularly and in a way that was not well explained in terms of environmental forcing. Rather, infant mortality cycles appeared to self-organize in response to the ontogeny of social play. Each cycle started when the death of multiple infants in an outbreak synchronized the reproductive cycles of their mothers. A pulse of births predictably arrived about twelve months later, with social connectivity increasing over the following two years as the large birth cohort approached the peak of social play. The high social connectivity at this play peak then appeared to facilitate further outbreaks. Our results provide the first evidence that social play has a strong role in determining chimpanzee disease transmission risk and the first record of chimpanzee disease cycles similar to those seen in human children. They also lend more support to the view that infectious diseases are a major threat to the survival of remaining chimpanzee populations.
