An ethological approach to attention predicts that organisms orient preferentially to valuable sources of information in the environment. For many gregarious species, orienting to other individuals provides valuable social information but competes with food acquisition, water consumption and predator avoidance. Individual variation in vigilance behaviour in humans spans a continuum from inattentive to pathological levels of interest in others. To assess the comparative biology of this behavioural variation, we probed vigilance rates in free-ranging macaques during water drinking, a behaviour incompatible with the gaze and postural demands of vigilance. Males were significantly more vigilant than females. Moreover, vigilance showed a clear genetic component, with an estimated heritability of 12%. Monkeys carrying a relatively infrequent ‘long’ allele of TPH2, a regulatory gene that influences serotonin production in the brain, were significantly less vigilant compared to monkeys that did not carry the allele. These findings resonate with the hypothesis that the serotonin pathway regulates vigilance in primates and by extension provoke the idea that individual variation in vigilance and its underlying biology may be adaptive rather than pathological.

Abstract. Exposure to elevated surface ozone is damaging to crops. In this study, we performed an analysis of temporal and spatial distributions of relative yield losses (RYLs) attributable to surface ozone for major crops in China from 2010 to 2017, by applying AOT40 metrics (hourly ozone concentration over a threshold of 40 ppbv during the growing season) simulated using a chemical transport model. The major crops in China include wheat, rice (including double early and late rice, and single rice), maize (including north and south maize), and soybean. The aggregated production and associated economic losses in China and major provinces were evaluated by combing annual crop production yields and crop market prices. We estimated that the national annual average AOT40 in China increased from 21.98 ppm h in 2010 to 23.85 ppm h in 2017, with a peak value of 35.69 ppm h in 2014, as simulated with the model. There is significant spatial heterogeneity for the AOT40 and RYLs across the four crops due to the seasonal ozone variations. We calculated that national mean RYLs for wheat, rice, maize, and soybean were 11.45 %–19.74 %, 7.59 %–9.29 %, 0.07 %–3.35 %, and 6.51 %–9.92 %, respectively, from 2010 to 2017. The associated crop yield losses were estimated at 13.81–36.51, 16.89–20.03, 4.59–8.17, and 1.09–1.84 million metric tons (Mt) respectively, which accounted for annual average economic loss of USD 9.55 billion, USD 8.53 billion, USD 2.23 billion, and USD 1.16 billion individually over the 8 years. Our study provides the first long-term quantitative estimation of crop yield losses and their economic cost from surface ozone exposure in China before and after the China Clean Air Act in 2013, and improves understanding of the spatial sensitivity of Chinese crops to ozone impacts.

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