Primatology.net

I’ve heard of Jill Greenberg‘s new book titled, Monkey Portraits but I haven’t had a chance to look through it. A post from One Digital Life, reminded me of it. Greenberg’s fame stems off of taking celebrity portraits, and a few years ago one of her photography sessions included taking pictures of a monkey. Greenberg enjoyed it so much that she decided to fill up a book full of monkey portaits.

Images © Jill Greenberg. All rights reserved.

Paul of One Digital Life shares with us two excting factoids, if you’re a big fan of Greenberg and monkey photos:

“You can win a signed copy by submitting a photo of your best monkey face (or photo with a monkey) to CoolHunting.com. Check the bottom of the CH article for details. Photo must be received by Monday, September 25th, 2006……Oh, and if you live in NYC, you can see the photos at Jill’s show, at the ClampArt Gallery from October 12th – November 11th, 2006.”

Does anyone wanna fly me to New York City? I’ll also be almost as happy if someone buys me a copy of the book!

Carol Noon, an athropologist with a PhD from the University of Florida, has managed to do what no one else has done for chimpanzees. She bought over 200 acres of land to build what will be the largest chimpanzee refuge in the world. When it’s complete in 2008, 291 chimps will roam virtually free on 12 islands, dotted with jungle gyms, hammocks, tire swings – and no cages! 266 chimps of the chimps were adopted when Noon won several legal battles against the United States Air Force and then rescued biomedical research company that is now bankrupt.

Noon specializes in resocialization of isolated chimpanzees and carefully chooses which chimps will go together to form “families” on the islands. It was her training in 1989 at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage in Zambia, where the animals were kept in 14-acre enclosures, that she was influences to build a large open cageless habitat for the chimps. I couldn’t agree more with her vision, and appreciate she is applying her specialization in resocialization without bars and enclosures. Here’s an image of the facilities and some of the chimps enjoying the open air:

An estimated 200,000 chimps still live in Africa, a rapid decrease from a few million just 50 years ago. The U.S. is home to 2,400 captive chimps, a few hundred of them live in zoos and work in Hollywood. About 1,700 are used in biomedical testing. Most of the chimps on the island are in their 40s and maybe have another decade left to live. Because Noon doesn’t believe in captive breeding, the males have had vasectomies.

Jane Goodall, also a board member of Noon’s Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care remarks,

“It took someone like Carole Noon to rescue the chimpanzees at Coulston. I was absolutely thrilled to see them on the island at the Florida sanctuary. The individual stories of their rehabilitation are truly moving.”

Noon’s Save the Chimps organization, the one that preceeds over the Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care, receives no government money, relying solely on donations to fund the $2.5 million a year operation. For $120 a year donors can click on Save The Chimps and adopt an animal.

Source, the Associated Press’ Big chimp refuge offers life with no cages.

A new paper published in Current Biology shows the similarities in adopting the same tactics for remembering where things are between human infants and apes. Differences arise as human children begin to develop their strategies.

There are two basic strategies animals use to remember spatial information; either the the individual remember a thing’s features, such as whether it was a banana, or they remember its place in space, such as left of this object.

Testing conducted on other species of animals show that animals such as chickens and toads, prefer a feature-based strategy. Others, such as fish and dogs, favor a place-based strategy. Daniel Haun, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and his colleagues extended their tests orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees and humans. They wanted to see whether humanity and its closest relatives all adopted the same strategies for remembering where things are. Any changes in strategy between species or within species would indicate on how they all evolved such behaviors like foraging patterns.

The paper, “Evolutionary Psychology of Spatial Representations in the Hominidae” documents the methodology Haun and his team operated on. They initially hid rewards such as grapes, banana slices or toy animals under either a hollow piece of wood, an imitation bird’s nest or an artificial hollow rock. At times, the rewards were concealed under the same object they were hidden beneath previously, whose place had changed. A feature-based strategy would best find these coveted items. And at other times, the rewards were hidden at the same place they were concealed before, but under a different object. A place-based strategy would best discover these items.

The abstract writes about the continuity between our species and the other great apes is masked early in human ontogeny,

“Comparatively little is known about the inherited primate background underlying human cognition, the human cognitive “wild-type.” Yet it is possible to trace the evolution of human cognitive abilities and tendencies by contrasting the skills of our nearest cousins, not just chimpanzees, but all the extant great apes, thus showing what we are likely to have inherited from the common ancestor [1]. By looking at human infants early in cognitive development, we can also obtain insights into native cognitive biases in our species [2]. Here, we focus on spatial memory, a central cognitive domain. We show, first, that all nonhuman great apes and 1-year-old human infants exhibit a preference for place over feature strategies for spatial memory. This suggests the common ancestor of all great apes had the same preference. We then examine 3-year-old human children and find that this preference reverses. Thus, the continuity between our species and the other great apes is masked early in human ontogeny. These findings, based on both phylogenetic and ontogenetic contrasts, open up the prospect of a systematic evolutionary psychology resting upon the cladistics of cognitive preferences.”

When human infants are a year old, they favor place-based strategies like all the other great ape species do. This suggests human and ape brains start out the same, at least when it comes to remembering where things are. The most recent common ancestors between humans and all the other great apes date back to about 15 million years ago, suggesting this common preference has been part of our brain structures since at least then. However, three-year-old children preferred a feature-based strategy. The researchers noted this shift in strategy coincided with a period when humans are first drawn into social life and acquire skills such as spoken language.

Cross posted on Anthropology.net, “Human Infants and Non-Human Great Apes remember spatial objects similarly.”

Paul Wren, from Wanna be an Anthropologist, emailed me this article, “Neonatal Imitation in Rhesus Macaques” the other night. I’m not surprised that John Hawks has already commented on it, but even super-blog Boing Boing has posted on it! The research shows that through several behavioral tests, like infant humans, newborn Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta) learn by imitation. The research influences me to conclude that that this kind of imitation has a purpose, as a form of social learning beyond great apes. Now mimmicry is not limited to apes and humans as previously thought. Rather, it evolved more than 25 million years before the monkey ancestors diverged from the human lineage.

Human newborns have a known capacity to mimic certain specific adult facial expressions, including mouth opening and tongue protrusion. The so-called imitation period lasts up to three months in human infants and two months in chimps. Since newborns cannot see their own faces, they rely on watching adults to learn facial expressions, and mimicry is thought to be crucial to the development of a mother-infant relationship.

The lead author, Pier Ferrari at the University of Parma, Italy, tested 21 newborn macaques by holding each in front of a researcher who made various facial expressions. The abstract reads,

“The emergence of social behaviors early in life is likely crucial for the development of mother–infant relationships. Some of these behaviors, such as the capacity of neonates to imitate adult facial movements, were previously thought to be limited to humans and perhaps the ape lineage. Here we report the behavioral responses of infant rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to the following human facial and hand gestures: lip smacking, tongue protrusion, mouth opening, hand opening, and opening and closing of eyes (control condition). In the third day of life, infant macaques imitate lip smacking and tongue protrusion. On the first day of life, the model’s mouth openings elicited a similar matched behavior (lip smacking) in the infants. These imitative responses are present at an early stage of development, but they are apparently confined to a narrow temporal window. Because lip smacking is a core gesture in face-to-face interactions in macaques, neonatal imitation may serve to tune infants’ affiliative responses to the social world. Our findings provide a quantitative description of neonatal imitation in a nonhuman primate species and suggest that these imitative capacities, contrary to what was previously thought, are not unique to the ape and human lineage. We suggest that their evolutionary origins may be traced to affiliative gestures with communicative functions.”

This picture documents a little macaque mimmicking what I call “sticking out your tongue” test.

At one day old, none of the infants showed any imitation. By day three, however, infants started to copy the researchers’ expressions, including tongue protrusions, mouth opening and lip smacking – all typical macaque expressions. By two weeks, all imitative behaviour had ceased, showing the imitation period in the monkeys is far shorter than for great apes. I wonder if that has to do with some sort of gene expression, or activation of mirror neurons? However, Ferrari notes that macaques may copy other macaques for longer.

Here’s two videos of the macaques immitating. This first one is of a macaque copying tongue poking:

The second of a macaque copying a mouth opening action:

I have a bit of good news bad news. First the good. On September 1st, 2006, the Frösö Zoo in Ostersund, Sweden welcomed the birth of two albino pygmy marmoset twins. These pygmy marmosets are exceedingly rare, and it is not because they’re twins… pygmy marmosets are typically born in pairs. The significance of their rarity is because they’re albinos, deficient in pigment.

Pygmy marmosets (Callithrix pygmaea) are the world’s smallest species of “true” monkey. These little ones, live in trees and makes big noise, contributing clicks, whistles, and squeals to the cacophony of their home habitat, the western Amazon rain forest of South America. Adults grow to about 5 inches (13 centimeters) in length and weigh about 6 ounces (170 grams).

The bad news is that one of them died shortly after birth. Ake Netterstrom, the zoo’s owner told London’s Daily Mail.

“We put in all available resources to save him, but that did not help. It is likely he had a lower immune defense because he was albino.”