Meeting Abstract
Social status can affect numerous aspects of individual behavior, but the mechanisms by which social cues exert their effects on physiological processes are poorly understood. Here we use the highly social cichlid fish, Astatotilapia burtoni, to examine the effects of social status on the transcriptomes of three key nodes of the evolutionarily conserved Social Decision-Making Network (SDMN) that is critical for evaluating the valence and salience of social and other stimuli. Males of this species transition between two social phenotypes – dominant males (DOMs) defend a territory and are reproductively active while subordinate males (SUBs) lack a territory and are reproductively suppressed. We monitored the behavior of 8 mixed sex communities (n=8 per sex) over six weeks. We then linked behavioral variation with levels of stress and sex hormones as well as the transcriptomes of the preoptic area (POA, critical for social behavior), area Dl (putative hippocampus homolog: spatial cognition, learning, and memory), and area Dm (medial amygdala complex: social cognition, aggressive and sexual behavior) of 51 DOMs and 68 SUBs. Our results show distinct expression profiles for different SDMN nodes, with numerous genes significantly varying between DOMs and SUBs. When we examined the behavioral, physiological, and molecular co-variance structure across individuals and brain regions, we discovered co-regulated clusters of these variables that provide insight into the mechanisms that generate individual variation within highly dynamic social groups, with consequences for individual well-being and reproductive success.
