Behavioral responses to injury and death in wild Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus)

The wounding or death of a conspecific has been shown to elicit varied behavioral responses throughout thanatology. Recently, a number of reports have presented contentious evidence of epimeletic behavior towards the dying and dead among non-human animals, a behavioral trait previously considered uniquely human. Here, we report on the behavioral responses of Barbary macaques, a social, non-human primate, to the deaths of four group members (one high-ranking adult female, one high-ranking adult male, one juvenile male, and one female infant), all caused by road traffic accidents. Responses appeared to vary based on the nature of the death (protracted or instant) and the age class of the deceased. Responses included several behaviors with potential adaptive explanations or consequences. These included exploration, caretaking (guarding, carrying, and grooming), and proximity to wounded individuals or corpses, and immediate as well as longer-lasting distress behaviors from other group members following death, all of which have been reported in other non-human primate species. These observations add to a growing body of comparative evolutionary analysis of primate thanatology and help to highlight the multifaceted impacts of human-induced fatalities on an endangered and socially complex primate. © 2016, Japan Monkey Centre and Springer Japan

Modelling ranging behaviour of female orang-utans: a case study in Tuanan, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

Quantification of the spatial needs of individuals and populations is vitally important for management and conservation. Geographic information systems (GIS) have recently become important analytical tools in wildlife biology, improving our ability to understand animal movement patterns, especially when very large data sets are collected. This study aims at combining the field of GIS with primatology to model and analyse space-use patterns of wild orang-utans. Home ranges of female orang-utans in the Tuanan Mawas forest reserve in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia were modelled with kernel density estimation methods. Kernel results were compared with minimum convex polygon estimates, and were found to perform better, because they were less sensitive to sample size and produced more reliable estimates. Furthermore, daily travel paths were calculated from 970 complete follow days. Annual ranges for the resident females were approximately 200 ha and remained stable over several years; total home range size was estimated to be 275 ha. On average, each female shared a third of her home range with each neighbouring female. Orang-utan females in Tuanan built their night nest on average 414 m away from the morning nest, whereas average daily travel path length was 777 m. A significant effect of fruit availability on day path length was found. Sexually active females covered longer distances per day and may also temporarily expand their ranges

Abrasive, Silica Phytoliths and the Evolution of Thick Molar Enamel in Primates, with Implications for the Diet of Paranthropus boisei

Background: Primates—including fossil species of apes and hominins—show variation in their degree of molar enamel thickness, a trait long thought to reflect a diet of hard or tough foods. The early hominins demonstrated molar enamel thickness of moderate to extreme degrees, which suggested to most researchers that they ate hard foods obtained on or near the ground, such as nuts, seeds, tubers, and roots. We propose an alternative hypothesis—that the amount of phytoliths in foods correlates with the evolution of thick molar enamel in primates, although this effect is constrained by a species ’ degree of folivory. Methodology/Principal Findings: From a combination of dietary data and evidence for the levels of phytoliths in plant families in the literature, we calculated the percentage of plant foods rich in phytoliths in the diets of twelve extant primates with wide variation in their molar enamel thickness. Additional dietary data from the literature provided the percentage of each primate’s diet made up of plants and of leaves. A statistical analysis of these variables showed that the amount of abrasive silica phytoliths in the diets of our sample primates correlated positively with the thickness of their molar enamel, constrained by the amount of leaves in their diet (R 2 = 0.875; p,.0006). Conclusions/Significance: The need to resist abrasion from phytoliths appears to be a key selective force behind the evolution of thick molar enamel in primates. The extreme molar enamel thickness of the teeth of the East African homini

Long-term Site Fidelity and Individual Home Range Shifts in Lophocebus albigena

We investigated long-term site fidelity of gray-cheeked mangabey (Lophocebus albigena) groups in Kibale National Park, Uganda. Concurrently, we monitored shifts in home range by individual females and subadult and adult males. We documented home range stability by calculating the area of overlap in successive years, and by recording the drift of each group’s monthly centroid from its initial location. Home ranges remained stable for 3 of our 4 groups (overlap over 10 yr >60%). Core areas were more labile, but group centroids drifted an average of only 530 m over the entire decade. Deviations from site fidelity were associated with dispersal or group fission. During natal dispersal, subadult males expanded their home ranges over many months, settling ≤4 home ranges away. Adult males, in contrast, typically dispersed within a few days to an adjacent group in an area of home range overlap. Adult males made solitary forays, but nearly always into areas used by their current group or by a group to which they had previously belonged. After secondary dispersal, they expanded their ranging in the company of their new group, apparently without prior solitary exploration of the new area. Some females also participated in home range shifts. Females shifted home ranges only within social groups, in association with temporary or permanent group splits. Our observations raise the possibility that male mangabeys use a finder-joiner mechanism when moving into new home ranges during secondary dispersal. Similarly, females might learn new resource locations from male immigrants before or during group fission

Multilevel Societies in Primates and Other Mammals: Introduction to the Special Issue

# The Author(s) 2012. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.co

The bii4africa dataset of faunal and floral population intactness estimates across Africa’s major land uses

Sub-Saharan Africa is under-represented in global biodiversity datasets, particularly regarding the impact of land use on species’ population abundances. Drawing on recent advances in expert elicitation to ensure data consistency, 200 experts were convened using a modified-Delphi process to estimate ‘intactness scores’: the remaining proportion of an ‘intact’ reference population of a species group in a particular land use, on a scale from 0 (no remaining individuals) to 1 (same abundance as the reference) and, in rare cases, to 2 (populations that thrive in human-modified landscapes). The resulting bii4africa dataset contains intactness scores representing terrestrial vertebrates (tetrapods: ±5,400 amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals) and vascular plants (±45,000 forbs, graminoids, trees, shrubs) in sub-Saharan Africa across the region’s major land uses (urban, cropland, rangeland, plantation, protected, etc.) and intensities (e.g., large-scale vs smallholder cropland). This dataset was co-produced as part of the Biodiversity Intactness Index for Africa Project. Additional uses include assessing ecosystem condition; rectifying geographic/ taxonomic biases in global biodiversity indicators and maps; and informing the Red List of Ecosystems

Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon¹⁻³. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes. However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses⁴⁻⁹. As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their biodiversity. A critical constraint in addressing this question has been that data describing a broad array of biodiversity groups have been unavailable for a sufficiently large and representative sample of reserves. Here we present a uniquely comprehensive data set on changes over the past 20 to 30 years in 31 functional groups of species and 21 potential drivers of environmental change, for 60 protected areas stratified across the world’s major tropical regions. Our analysis reveals great variation in reserve ‘health’: about half of all reserves have been effective or performed passably, but the rest are experiencing an erosion of biodiversity that is often alarmingly widespread taxonomically and functionally. Habitat disruption, hunting and forest-product exploitation were the strongest predictors of declining reserve health. Crucially, environmental changes immediately outside reserves seemed nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate, with changes inside reserves strongly mirroring those occurring around them. These findings suggest that tropical protected areas are often intimately linked ecologically to their surrounding habitats, and that a failure to stem broad-scale loss and degradation of such habitats could sharply increase the likelihood of serious biodiversity declines.Keywords: Ecology, Environmental scienc