Abstract

Accumulating evidence in humans and other mammals suggests older individuals tend to have smaller social networks. Uncovering the cause of these declines is important as it can inform how changes in social relationships with age might affect health and fitness in later life. Smaller social networks might be detrimental, but may also be the result of greater selectivity in partner choice, reflecting an adaptive solution to physical or physiological limitations imposed by age. While greater selectivity with age has been shown in humans, the extent to which active social selectivity within an individuals lifetime occurs across the animal kingdom remains an open question. Using 8 years of longitudinal data from a population of free-ranging rhesus macaques we provide the first evidence in a non-human animal for within-individual increases in social selectivity with age. Going beyond previous cross-sectional studies, our within-individual analyses revealed that adult female macaques actively reduced the size of their networks as they aged and focused on partners previously linked to fitness benefits, including kin and partners to whom they were strongly and consistently connected earlier in life. Females spent similar amounts of time socializing as they aged, suggesting that network shrinkage does not result from lack of motivation or ability to engage. Furthermore, females remained attractive companions and were not isolated by withdrawal of social partners. Taken together, our results provide rare empirical evidence for social selectivity in non-humans, suggesting patterns of social aging in humans may be deeply rooted in primate evolution and may have adaptive value. Significance statementThe narrowing of social networks and prioritization of meaningful relationships with age is commonly observed in humans. Determining whether social selectivity is exhibited by other animals remains critical to furthering our understanding of the evolution of late-life changes in sociality. Here we test key predictions from the social selectivity hypothesis and demonstrate that female rhesus macaques show within-individual changes in sociality with age that resemble the human social aging phenotype. Our use of longitudinal data to track how individuals change their social behavior within their lifetimes offers the most conclusive evidence to date that social selectivity is not a phenomenon unique to humans and therefore might have deeper evolutionary underpinnings.