Most endangered primates

Conservation organisations have published an updated list of the 25 most endangered primates

Once again, this report shows that the world’s primates are under increasing threat from human activities. Whilst we haven’t lost any primate species yet during this century, some of them are in very dire straits, In particular the lemurs are now one of the world’s most endangered groups of mammals, after more than three years of political crisis and a lack of effective enforcement in their home country, Madagascar. A similar crisis is happening in South-East Asia, where trade in wildlife is bringing many primates very close to extinction.

-- Dr Christoph Schwitzer, Head of Research at the Bristol Conservation and Science Foundation (BCSF).

Wiki page here
 

'Finally we built our porcupine mother...'

The first of these monsters was a cloth monkey mother who, upon schedule or demand, would eject high-pressure compressed air. It would blow the [infant macaque's] skin practically off its body. What did this baby monkey do? It simply clung tighter and tighter to the mother, because a frightened infant clings to its mother at all costs. We did not achieve any psychopathology.

However, we did not give up. We built another surrogate monster mother that would rock so violently that the baby's head and teeth would rattle. All the baby did was cling tighter and tighter to the surrogate. The third monster we built had an embedded wire frame within its body which would spring forward and eject the infant from its ventral surface [i.e., its front]. The infant would subsequently pick itself off the floor, wait for the frame to return into the cloth body, and then again cling to the surrogate.

Finally we built our porcupine mother. On command, this mother would eject sharp brass spikes over all of the ventral surfaces of its body. Although the infants weredistressed by these pointed rebuffs, they simply waited until the spikes receded and then returned and clung to the mother.

-- from a description of the Surrogate mother experiment conducted by Harry F. Harlow and Stephen J. Suomi at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1960s.

The account is quoted by James Rachels in Chapter 5 of Created From Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism.

Poetical essays on the dark gibbon

[In China] gibbons were praised for their quiet, serene nature and spiritual qualities. Elusive and rarely seen, they inhabited remote areas thought to be haunted by supernatural beings. Gibbons were considered magical animals, capable of assuming human form. Their evocative cries were associated with the eerie atmosphere of these mysterious places and inspired melancholy feelings in travellers. A famous image in Chinese poetry was of 'gibbons calling at the gorges', reflecting the fact that these animals were often heard but seldom seen among the high, woody, mist-covered cliff sides they inhabited...

Chinese paintings often associate gibbons with cranes. Gibbons' long arms and cranes' long necks indicate longevity and both creatures are appreciated for the graceful movements. A common notion was that, by linking hands, gibbons formed themselves into chains that allowed them to dangle from branches and dip drinking water from streams. Another popular image from Chinese and Japanese art depicts gibbons, sometimes linked in chains, grasping for the moon's reflection in a pool of water...The image is a parable for greed and striving for things that cannot be attained...

-- from Ape by John Sorenson


Black-crested gibbons

A laugh is quite catching, you see...

The infectiousness of laughter even works across species. Below my office window at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, Georgia, I often hear my chimps laugh during rough-and-tumble games, and cannot suppress a chuckle myself. It’s such a happy sound. Tickling and wrestling are the typical laugh triggers for apes, and probably the original ones for humans. The fact that tickling oneself is notoriously ineffective attests to its social significance. And when young apes put on their “play face” (as the laugh expression is known), their friends join in with the same expression as rapidly and easily as humans do with laughter.

...That is where empathy and sympathy start—with the synchronization of bodies—not in the higher regions of imagination, or in the ability to consciously reconstruct how we would feel if we were in someone else’s “shoes.”

-- Frans de Waal

The babbling marmoset

Pretty random this one, but pleasing enough to share:

Vocal play (in the form of babbling) does not appear to be unique to humans. Elowson et al. note that this behaviour occurs in juvenile pygmy marmosets, that response from a caregiving adult is more likely when the juvenile is vocalising, and suggest that pygmy marmoset babbling has relevance to understanding the evolutionary processes of human vocal development.

-- from The Evolution of Music: Theories, Definitions and the Nature of the Evidence by Ian Cross and Iain Morley (2002)

But this is the opposite of pleasing:

Orangutan oratorio

Research indicates that (some) orangutans make wind 'instruments' out of folded vegetation, blowing through it to modulate the sound of their alarm calls (reports here and here). This makes them the only animal apart from humans known to use tools to manipulate sound.

I happen to be researching (and attempting to write about) the origins and significance of human music at the moment, so especially enjoyed this. As Robert Shumaker of the Great Ape Trust says, "It's really, really nice to see an example [of tool use] that has absolutely nothing to do with food."


(see also the funky gibbon)

Goodnight gorilla

Redoubling efforts to protect gorillas and their habitats will benefit other endangered primates, including chimps and bonobos. If those efforts centre on development projects and gorilla tourism, they can also improve the lives of some of the world's poorest people. That is the UN's plan. And entirely the wrong one, as far as many gorilla experts are concerned. For all its good intentions, they say, there's no way it can work fast enough to give gorillas any chance of recovery.

-- from Last Chance to Save the Gorilla

Bionic monkeys

[This is] the first demonstration that the brain can form a motor memory to control a disembodied device in a way that mirrors how it controls its own body.

-- Emergence of a Stable Cortical Map for Neuroprosthetic Control, NYT report.

The funky gibbon

Jonathan Balcombe (2006) quotes Eugene Lindon (2003):

There is a world of difference between what a scientist can publish and what we encounter in the world.

The discovery that a female White-handed Gibbon living in captivity bangs a door in time with her territorial song is described by Thomas Geissmann, a leading expert on gibbon conservation and behaviour, as 'tool use'.

Following Steven Mithen (2008), would it really hurt to describe this as a [very basic] kind of 'music making'?

98.6% human

...minus the aggression. Eric Michael Johnson reports and links to a new film.

Ouch

Its poisonous elbows (sic) lead illegal traders to yank out the teeth of this endangered animal with wire cutters, reports David Adam.

Malu malu

As may be guessed from the author profile picture for this blog, the thought causes a twinge.

Sphinx

The sound was out of place. "Here we were, far from the sea in the middle of the rain forest, and through the great trees came a sound like waves drawing across a massive pebbly beach". It was, Lee White soon saw, a big troop of Mandrills sorting through the leaf litter in search of food. The encounter set him on a path of research and discovery that helped to revolutionize understanding of these colorful monkeys and do more to protect them. [1]

Now, as a representative for the government of Gabon, White tries to negotiate the best deal for his country not to fell the forests where the Mandrill and other amazing species live [2] by getting those forests recognised as carbon stocks within the UNFCCC. [3]

Carbonize your wildlife. Charles Darwin called the adult male mandrill, Mandrillus sphinx, “the most vividly colored specimen in mammaldom.”

Nearly 2.3 million square kilometres of rainforest in the Congo basin countries are estimated to contain carbon equivalent to about 15 years worth of anthropogenic emissions at current rates, and be 'worth' about US$1.25 trillion at current market prices. [4] To a non-market fundamentalist the logic and the numbers may seem surreal.

Gabon is relatively fortunate in being more sparsely populated and better governed than some of its neighbours.  [5] Its rainforests may be quite robust under some climate change scenarios. One of the 'nightmares' would destruction that arises as a consequence of greater climate change elsewhere: if, for example, some decades from now millions or tens of millions of people try to escape a West African dust bowl by migrating this way. [6]

A Fang Ngil mask.

Footnotes

[1] Mandrills live very differently from baboons, whom they superficially resemble, in groups that can be more than 600 strong.

[2] The range of species still hanging on in the Congo basin is vast. In Gabon it includes the Sun-tailed monkey (one of those names that definitely sounds better in French: Singe au queu de soleil), a survivor in what was a forest refugium during the Pleistocene.

[3] (added 22 March): See, for example, 'Crunch year' for world's forests.

[4] The calculation goes roughly as follows. There 227,600,000 hectares of forest averaging 125 tonnes of carbon per hectare. That makes 28,450,000,000 tonnes of carbon, or 104,411, 500,000 tonnes of CO2. The carbon price is given as $12 per tonne.

[5] (added 18 May) The country's relatively intact biodiversity persists in some of its coastal areas too.  The 'world's largest' colony of Leatherback turtles has recently been found there.

[6] There has been substantial human migration in the past. Bantu peoples equipped with iron tools, banana plants and oil palm seeds swept down this way about 2600 years ago. The population crashed more than a 1000 years ago, and huge mahogany forests now grow in places that were extensively settled. But the size of a human migration in the 21st century could be greater might by two or more orders of magnitude.

Kids and kin

When Ahla comes home in the evening after feeding, she will go...through a door to the lambs' enclosure. From here, she can only hear the adult animals but not see them. Once she hears from inside the voice of a lamb that is calling for its mother, she will retrieve the correct lamb and jump through the opening...and put it underneath its mother so it can drink. She does this flawlessly even when several other mothers are calling and several lambs are responding at the same time... She also retrieves lambs and brings them back even before mother and infant have begun calling. Mrs Aston [the farm's owner] noted that "No local personnel and no white person would be able to assign correctly the 20 or more identically looking lambs to the mothers. However Ahla is never wrong".

Ahla, explain Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth [1], was a baboon. According to their source, she was never trained to recognise the kinship relations between mother goats and their kids:

She does things that she has never observed and that she has never been told. Ocassionaly though, she was punished with a belt when for instance she took a lamb up into the top of the trees where she slept.

Footnote

[1] Baboon Metaphysics (2007). Cheny and Seyfarth record that goat herding with baboons was practiced by the Namaqua people before it was practiced by people of European descent in Southern Africa. Their source for the story of Ahla is Hoesch, von W. (1961) Uber Ziegen huetende Baerenpaviane. Other amazing baboon stories include Jack the Signalman.

Like mind

[It] is hard to say what is instinct in animals & what is reason, in precisely the same way [it] is not possible to say what [is] habitual in men and what reasonable. …as man has hereditary tendencies, therefore man's mind is not so different from that of brutes.

-- Charles Darwin (1838 a), quoted in Baboon Metaphysics (2007).

Interest in the idea of a herd mentality [in humans] has been renewed by work into mirror neurons - cells that fire when we perform an action or watch someone perform a similar action. It suggests that our brains are geared to mimic our peers. "We are set up for 'auto-copy'," says the psychologist Jonathan Haidt...[who] thinks this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause, though these tactics can be used just as well for peace, he stresses.

-- from How to control a herd of humans.

This notion of the autonomous individual who is in charge of his or her fate is one that I couldn't really subscribe to.

-- W G Sebald quoted by Will Self.

Twilight souls

Having proved men and brutes bodies on one type: almost superfluous to consider minds. [1]

Almost but not quite:

He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke. [2]

What, then, to make of the 'new, scientific' study of morality by the likes of Marc Hauser, which may point to something like this:

the science [sic] of morality may bring into doubt some of our most deeply ingrained cultural perceptions about right and wrong. We’ll have new, richer opportunities to examine our actions in the presence of consequences. We probably won’t like what we see. [But] those awkward realizations may be the greatest value of moral science. [3]

How far are we here from:

No man can ever attain to anywhere near a true conception of the subconscious of man who does not know primates under natural conditions. [4]

Carlo Fausto [5] quotes Friedrich Nietzsche:

Our body is, after all, only a society constructed out of many souls.

and Mia Couto:

In Lua-do-Chão, there is no word to say “poor.” One says “orphan.” This is true misery: to have no kin.

Footnotes

1. Charles Darwin, Notebooks on transmutations of species.

2. Darwin, 1838 notebook.

3. Reinventing Morality, a review of Moral Minds (2006).

4. Eugène Marais, in a letter from 1935, republished in an introduction to the The Soul of the Ape by Robert Ardrey. Ardrey was an advocate of the now unfashionable 'killer ape' hypothesis. More popular these days may be the 'kind ape' hypothesis. ('Twilight souls' is a term used by Marais to describe the Chacma baboons of the Waterberg. There is evidence that Australopithecus africanus and, later, Homo erectus lived in the Waterberg.)

5. Feasting on People: Eating Animals and Humans in Amazonia, 2007. DOI: 10.1086/518298

Image: Gaza

The eyes have it

The first sighting of a pygmy tarsier in more than 80 years is celebrated. This sounds like good news...unless it sends the poachers after those that remain (or is indicative of extirpation from a final patch of surviving habitat etc etc).

In the contemporary West we tend to think of the various tarsier species as cute, as well as fascinating. But I recently heard David Macdonald say that local people in an area of S E Asia where he worked in the 1970s (I think) would deny ever seeing them at all because to do so was believed to cause stillbirth in women and all other kinds of bad luck.

P.S. More at Afarensis.

You lookin' at me?

If the mammal face is an instrument for communication, the primate face is a Stradivarius.

-- Karl Zimmer on the study of the face and communication since Darwin.

According to Michael Tomasello, one of the few truly distinctive human features is visible whites to the eyes [1].

Footnote

[1] but the origin of the famous line is Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw in 1743

Langurs linger

See: It Takes Just One Village to Save a Species.

Ownership and collapse

Fisheries in which individuals (or groups of) fishermen have a right to a share can provide incentives for sustainable harvest that is less prone to collapse, says research based on a study of 11,135 fisheries from 1950 to 2003 [1]. But, warn the authors:

Despite the dramatic impact catch shares have had on fishery collapse, these results should not be taken as a carte blanche endorsement. First, we have restricted attention to one class of catch shares (ITQs). Second, only by appropriately matching institutional reform with ecological, economic, and social characteristics can maximal benefits be achieved.

On land, there may be almost no level of killing of some animals (such as great apes and other primates taken as bush meat in Africa) which allows a viable population to survive. Nevertheless, argues a report, the best way to reduce the slaughter is for hunting by local people to be legalised and regulated [2]. Also, it's suggested, new ways should be found of making endangered animals more valuable alive than dead, perhaps through government schemes to reward local villages financially if they preserve or increase populations. But, warns one conservationist, "People living in poverty are in for dire times, and both they and many species are heading for a train wreck."


Notes

[1] Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse? by Christopher Costello, Steven D. Gaines and John Lynham. DOI: 10.1126/science.1159478. [Peter Kareiva, Amy Chang and Michelle Marvier argue "the key to success in conservation is the development of market mechanisms and new sources of finance for conservation." (DOI: 10.1126/science.1162756) ]

[2] CBD Report 33 by Robert Nasi et al from CIFOR , discussed in Should we legalise hunting of endangered species? by Andy Coghlan, New Scientist, 18 Sep. "In central Africa, 1 million tonnes of bushmeat are harvested each year, supplying 80 per cent of the protein and fat that people in the region consume." (More photos of bush meat, some of them disturbing, can be found here.)