Relationship quality affects fission decisions in wild spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi)

Fission-fusion dynamics are thought to be mainly a response to differential availability of food resources. However, social factors may also play a role. Here, we examined whether the quality of social relationships between group members affects fission decisions. During 21 months, we collected data on social interactions and fission events of 22 spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) living in a community in the protected area of Otoch Ma'ax Yetel Kooh, Yucatan, Mexico. By entering seven indexes of social interactions into a principal component analysis, we obtained three components of relationship quality, which we labelled "compatibility," "value" and "insecurity" given the relative loadings of the indexes. Our results showed that individuals were more likely to fission into the same subgroup with community members with whom they shared higher levels of compatibility and value and lower levels of insecurity. In addition, individuals preferred to fission into the same subgroup with same-sex group members, as expected based on what is known for the species. Our findings highlight the role of social factors in fission decisions. Adjustments in subgroup size are based on multifaceted social preferences, incorporating previously unexamined aspects of relationship quality, which are independent from overall levels of affiliative interactions. © 2017 Blackwell Verlag GmbH

Watch out or relax: conspecifics affect vigilance in wild spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi)

In most animal species, predation risk is considered the main factor affecting vigilance, and an individual is expected to spend less time vigilant in larger than in smaller groups. However, vigilance patterns in primates appear to differ, with no consistency in group-size effects. As individuals in highly gregarious species such as diurnal primates face frequent threats from group members, there may be increased vigilance in larger groups to monitor conspecifics rather than or in addition to predators. We tested this hypothesis in wild spider monkeys, which live in communities but fission and fuse in subgroups of variable size and membership throughout the same day. We found no overall effect of subgroup size, as traditionally measured, on vigilance. However, a possible explanation is that vigilance may be effectively shared only with individuals in close proximity, rather than with all subgroup members. We found that a larger number of neighbours (i.e., subgroup members within 5 m) was associated with a lower proportion of time individuals spent vigilant, which is similar to findings in other studies. Another social factor that may affect individuals’ vigilance is the possibility of between-community encounters. Higher levels of vigilance can be expected in areas closer to the boundary of the home range, where between-community encounters are more likely to occur compared with non-boundary areas. We found that location in terms of boundary vs. non-boundary areas had a significant effect on the time individuals spent vigilant in the expected direction. We also found that location modulated the effect of subgroup size on vigilance: only in the boundary areas did larger subgroup sizes result in less individual vigilance time. We concluded that conspecifics affect vigilance of wild spider monkeys in multiple ways

Target-Aware Neural Architecture Search and Deployment for Keyword Spotting

Keyword spotting (KWS) utilities have become increasingly popular on a wide range of mobile and home devices, representing a prolific application field for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which are commonly exploited to perform keyword classification. Addressing the challenges of targeting such resource-constrained platforms, requires a careful definition of the CNN architecture and the overall system implementation. These reasons have led to a growing need for design and optimization flows, able to intrinsically take into account the system's performance when ported on the target platform. In this work, we present a design methodology based on Neural Architecture Search, exploited to combine the exploration of the optimal network topology, the audio pre-processing scheme, and the data quantization policy. The proposed design flow includes target-awareness in the exploration loop, comparing the different design alternatives according to a model-based pre-evaluation of metrics like execution latency, memory footprint, and energy consumption, evaluated considering the application's execution on the target processing platform. We have tested our design flow to obtain target-specific CNNs for a resource-constrained commercial platform, the ST SensorTile. Considering two different application scenarios, enabling the comparison with the state-of-the-art of efficient CNN-based models for KWS, we have obtained up to a 1.8% accuracy improvement and a 40% footprint reduction in the most favorable case

Watch out! Insecure relationships affect vigilance in wild spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi)

Abstract: Vigilance is used to monitor extra-group threats as well as risky group members. We examined whether relationship quality affects vigilance patterns of spider monkeys. We used focal animal sampling to collect data on social interactions and individual vigilance of all adults and subadults (N = 22) in a community of well-habituated Geoffroy’s spider monkeys living in the protected area of Otoch Ma’ax Yetel Kooh, Yucatan, Mexico. Through a principal component analysis of seven indices of social interactions, we previously obtained three components of relationship quality, reflecting the levels of compatibility, value, and security. Such components could differentially affect vigilance depending on whether vigilance is directed to extra-group threats or risky group members. We tested whether an individual’s vigilance was affected by (1) the mean level of compatibility, the mean level of value and the mean level of security across subgroup members; (2) the lowest level of compatibility, the lowest level of value, and the lowest level of security with any subgroup member; and (3) the mean level of compatibility, the mean level of value, and the mean level of security with neighbors (i.e., subgroup members within 5 m). We did not find evidence for any effect of compatibility and value; however, security did affect vigilance, as individuals were more vigilant when they had a less secure relationship with the subgroup member with the lowest level of security or with the average neighbor. Significance statement: Vigilance for monitoring group members is common in primate species. We examined whether the quality of social relationships with subgroup members and neighbors modulates vigilance in wild spider monkeys. We used three components of relationship quality (reflecting the levels of compatibility, value, and security) and predicted each component would affect vigilance depending on whether vigilance was directed to extra-group threats or risky group members. We found no evidence that compatibility and value affected vigilance. However, an increase in vigilance occurred when spider monkeys had a less secure relationship with (1) the subgroup member with the lowest level of security and (2) the average neighbor. Our results show monitoring risky group members is an important component of vigilance, especially in species facing low predation pressure. © 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature

Predation Attacks on Wild Spider Monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi).

We report 2 cases of predation on an adult and a subadult spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi) by a puma (Puma concolor) and an unidentified terrestrial predator at the natural protected area of Otoch Ma'ax yetel Kooh, in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. Although spider monkeys are believed to experience overall low predation pressure compared to other primate species, our observations show that predation occurs in the study area and therefore behavioral strategies are likely to be in place to reduce predation risk. Our observations are further evidence that terrestrial predators are a threat for both young and full-grown spider monkeys

Optimization and deployment of CNNs at the Edge: The ALOHA experience

Deep learning (DL) algorithms have already proved their effectiveness on a wide variety of application domains, including speech recognition, natural language processing, and image classification. To foster their pervasive adoption in applications where low latency, privacy issues and data bandwidth are paramount, the current trend is to perform inference tasks at the edge. This requires deployment of DL algorithms on low-energy and resource-constrained computing nodes, often heterogenous and parallel, that are usually more complex to program and to manage without adequate support and experience. In this paper, we present ALOHA, an integrated tool flow that tries to facilitate the design of DL applications and their porting on embedded heterogenous architectures. The proposed tool flow aims at automating different design steps and reducing development costs. ALOHA considers hardware-related variables and security, power efficiency, and adaptivity aspects during the whole development process, from pre-training hyperparameter optimization and algorithm configuration to deployment

Development and Validation of the Behavioral Tendencies Questionnaire

At a fundamental level, taxonomy of behavior and behavioral tendencies can be described in terms of approach, avoid, or equivocate (i.e., neither approach nor avoid). While there are numerous theories of personality, temperament, and character, few seem to take advantage of parsimonious taxonomy. The present study sought to implement this taxonomy by creating a questionnaire based on a categorization of behavioral temperaments/tendencies first identified in Buddhist accounts over fifteen hundred years ago. Items were developed using historical and contemporary texts of the behavioral temperaments, described as “Greedy/Faithful”, “Aversive/Discerning”, and “Deluded/Speculative”. To both maintain this categorical typology and benefit from the advantageous properties of forced-choice response format (e.g., reduction of response biases), binary pairwise preferences for items were modeled using Latent Class Analysis (LCA). One sample (n1 = 394) was used to estimate the item parameters, and the second sample (n2 = 504) was used to classify the participants using the established parameters and cross-validate the classification against multiple other measures. The cross-validated measure exhibited good nomothetic span (construct-consistent relationships with related measures) that seemed to corroborate the ideas present in the original Buddhist source documents. The final 13-block questionnaire created from the best performing items (the Behavioral Tendencies Questionnaire or BTQ) is a psychometrically valid questionnaire that is historically consistent, based in behavioral tendencies, and promises practical and clinical utility particularly in settings that teach and study meditation practices such as Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)

Upregulation of CRABP1 in human neuroblastoma cells overproducing the Alzheimer-typical Aβ42 reduces their differentiation potential

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by neurodegeneration and changes in cellular processes, including neurogenesis. Proteolytic processing of the amyloid precursor protein (APP) plays a central role in AD. Owing to varying APP processing, several β-amyloid peptides (Aβ) are generated. In contrast to the form with 40 amino acids (Aβ₄₀), the variant with 42 amino acids (Aβ₄₂) is thought to be the pathogenic form triggering the pathological cascade in AD. While total-Aβ effects have been studied extensively, little is known about specific genome-wide effects triggered by Aβ₄₂or Aβ₄₀derived from their direct precursor C99.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A combined transcriptomics/proteomics analysis was performed to measure the effects of intracellularly generated Aβ peptides in human neuroblastoma cells. Data was validated by real-time polymerase chain reaction (real-time PCR) and a functional validation was carried out using RNA interference.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here we studied the transcriptomic and proteomic responses to increased or decreased Aβ₄₂and Aβ₄₀levels generated in human neuroblastoma cells. Genome-wide expression profiles (Affymetrix) and proteomic approaches were combined to analyze the cellular response to the changed Aβ₄₂- and Aβ₄₀-levels. The cells responded to this challenge with significant changes in their expression pattern. We identified several dysregulated genes and proteins, but only the cellular retinoic acid binding protein 1 (CRABP1) was up-regulated exclusively in cells expressing an increased Aβ₄₂/Aβ₄₀ratio. This consequently reduced all-trans retinoic acid (RA)-induced differentiation, validated by CRABP1 knock down, which led to recovery of the cellular response to RA treatment and cellular sprouting under physiological RA concentrations. Importantly, this effect was specific to the AD typical increase in the Aβ₄₂/Aβ₄₀ratio, whereas a decreased ratio did not result in up-regulation of CRABP1.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We conclude that increasing the Aβ₄₂/Aβ₄₀ratio up-regulates CRABP1, which in turn reduces the differentiation potential of the human neuroblastoma cell line SH-SY5Y, but increases cell proliferation. This work might contribute to the better understanding of AD neurogenesis, currently a controversial topic.</p

Do Fruit Nutrients Affect Subgrouping Patterns in Wild Spider Monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi)?

One of the main costs of group living is feeding competition. Fission–fusion dynamics are thought to be a strategy to avoid overt competition for food resources. We tested whether food abundance and quality affected such dynamics in a species characterized by a high degree of fission–fusion dynamics. We collected data on 22 adult and subadult spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) living in a large community in the protected area of Otoch Ma’ax Yetel Kooh, Yucatan, Mexico. We recorded subgroup size and fission events as well as fruit abundance during 12 mo and conducted nutritional analyses on the fruit species that the study subjects consumed most. We found no effect of fruit abundance or nutritional quality of recently visited food patches on individual fission decisions, but the amount of protein in the food patches visited over the course of the day was a good predictor of subgroup size. While the absence of support for a relationship between fruit characteristics and fission decisions may be due to the short temporal scale of the analysis, our findings relating subgroup size to the amount of protein in the visited food patches over the course of the day may be explained by individual spider monkeys attempting to obtain sufficient protein intake from their fruit-based diet. © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New Yor

Homosexual Behavior Between Male Spider Monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi).

Homosexual behavior is defined as genital contact or genital manipulation between same-sex individuals. In nonhuman primates, it may regulate social relationships by serving as a means of reconciliation, tension alleviation, or alliance formation. Grappling is a rare and complex behavior, which most frequently occurs between same-sex individuals of the genus Ateles and can include mutual manipulation of the genitalia. Here we report three cases of penile-anal intromission during grappling between wild male spider monkeys living in the natural protected area of Otoch Ma'ax Yetel Kooh, Mexico. In all the observed cases, the same adult male was the actor. To our knowledge, this is the first report of penile-anal intromission between males in any New World primate species