Recent advances in noninvasive techniques to monitor hormone-behavior interactions

This paper reviews recent advances in field endocrinology, a focus as well as a method in primatology and behavioral ecology that permits the examinat ion of social behavior and life history through hormonal investigations in natural settings. Endocrine data complements the traditional behavioral. da ta collected by field scientists by providing quantitative measures for the examination of adaptive tradeoffs, costs of social strategies, and reprodu ctive and social significance of mating events. Further, investigations of the physiological mechanisms of reproductive constraint provide tests of th e adaptive significance of reproductive skew in cooperative and competitive breeders. Hormone data also can provide insights into the costs of competi tion and aggression and the role of temperament in individual reproductive success and the evolution of social systems. New, noninvasive methods for t he collection of this information have augmented and expanded field endocri nology through the use of techniques that do not require potentially confou nding physical or physiological manipulations. Specifically, urine and feca l samples can be collected from free-ranging animals and contain gonadal an d adrenal hormones that parallel profiles of serum hormones. Sampling, pres ervation, extraction, and assay methods for the analysis of excreted steroi ds are reviewed along with the species and questions to which these methods have been applied. Yrbk Phys Anthropol 41:1-23, 1998. (C) 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.