Primatology.net

BBC News recently reported on a pretty interesting three-year long research project that is not the typical non-human primate-focused research we usually highlight on this site, but I couldn’t resist bringing it up. The project, FEELIX Growing, a multi-national project is aiming to create robots that read and react to humans in an appropriate manner.

Dr. Lola Canamero, coordinator of the project, from the University of Hertfordshire:

“We are most interested programming and developing behavioural capabilities, particularly in social and emotional interactions with humans.”

Here’s the project summary:

“If robots are to be truly integrated in humans’ everyday environment in order to provide services such as company, caregiving, entertainment, patient monitoring, aids in therapy, etc., they cannot be simply designed and taken off the shelf to be directly embedded into a real-life setting. Adaptation to incompletely known and changing environments and personalization to their human users and partners are necessary features to achieve successful long-term integration. This integration would require that, like children (but on a shorter time-scale), robots develop embedded in the social environment in which they will fulfill their roles. The overall goal of this project is the interdisciplinary investigation of socially situated development from an integrated or global perspective, as a key paradigm towards achieving robots that interact with humans in their everyday environments in a rich, flexible, autonomous, and user-centred way. To achieve this general goal we set the following specific objectives:

1. Identification of scenarios presenting key issues and typologies of problems in the investigation of global socially situated development of autonomous (biologically and robotic) agents.
2. Investigation of the roles of emotion, interaction, expression, and their interplays in bootstrapping and driving socially situated development, which includes implementation of robotic systems that improve existing work in each of those aspects, and their testing in the key identified scenarios.
3. Integration of (a) the above capabilities in at least 2 different robotic systems, and (b) feedback across the disciplines involved.
4. Identification of needs and key steps towards achieving standards in: (a) the design of scenarios and problem typologies, (b) evaluation metrics, (c) the design of robotic platforms and related technology that can be realistically integrated in people’s everyday life.

FEELIX GROWING takes a highly interdisciplinary approach that combines theories, methods, and technology from developmental and comparative psychology, neuroimagery, ethology, and autonomous and developmental robotics, to investigate how socially situated development can be brought to robots that grow up and adapt to humans in everyday environments. We expect to have a significant impact on the scientific community, on two grounds. On the one hand, our research focus poses an important and as-yet largely unexplored scientific question that is increasingly recognized as a keystone in the development of human-oriented social technology and in the understanding of humans, and can contribute to the advancement of entertainment, developmental, service, and rehabilitation robotics. On the other hand, our strongly interdisciplinary effort could make important contributions to a number of disciplines and set the grounds towards long-term collaborations among them.”

The description of the robot itself is quite reminiscent of a family pet (or a service animal) in that it is

“to be truly integrated in humans’ everyday environment in order to provide services such as company, caregiving, entertainment, patient monitoring, aids in therapy, etc.”

With that in mind, I couldn’t help but think about the vastly different perceptions science has on the animal mind (some may say that I’m a bit obsessed about it). It’s fascinating that we as a scientific community are on the verge of creating a machine (or more specifically software) with the capabilities to “learn from humans and respond in a socially and emotionally appropriate manner,” yet frequently deny this ability in non-human animals.

It’s frustrating to work with a scientist that comes into their lab telling stories of how when he got home last night, he could immediately tell that his golden retriever, Harry, did something wrong based upon the look on his face alone… and then proceed to close off all thought about the possibility that his subjects share those emotions. He of course will say that he is simply being objective. But couldn’t one argue that not taking into account all of your subject’s abilities be a hindrance to your objectivity?

This is not to suggest that we should bias our opinions based on what happens at home, but to suggest that we as humans are the only emotional beings appears to be a bit arrogant. I feel that not taking a chance and hiding behind scientific precedents (potentially to save one’s career) is a hindrance upon what we can discover. Sure new theories and thoughts can be intimidating, but exploring those in an objective manner is what we thrive upon… it’s why we do what we do.

Please don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not saying that this is something I’m seeing in the FEELIX Growing project, it’s just some thoughts that have popped up while reading about their interesting project… and it leaves me wondering what will come from this project in terms of the animal mind.

If you’ve never seen a cotton-top tamarin, it doesn’t take much imagination to visualize what they look like. These little monkeys, are native to Colombia, and have a tale-tell head full of white fluffy hair. The general outlook on cotton-top tamarin survival has been pretty low because,

“a combination of deforestation and exports for biomedical research during the 1960s and 70s left cotton-top monkeys facing extinction…”

So it news like Hampshire Zoo‘s success in breeding a set of cotton-top tamarin twins is really good news to me. From the BBC,

“The cotton-top tamarin twins were born as part of a breeding programme at Marwell Zoo, near Winchester.

They have been named Zambrono and Tol after places near the Las Coloradas Sanctuary in their native Colombia, South America.

The twins are being nursed and cared for by their mother Magdalena, while dad also shares responsibilities.”

Marwell Zoo has been very successful in rebuilding the cotton-top population (albeit they are in captivity), they have breed over 50 individuals. The twins seem healthy and are being reared by both parents.

I wish the zookeepers the best of luck, and if they happen to read this, keep up the good work!

Captivity does strange things to animals, but what’s happening at Taman Safari animal hospital in Java, Indonesia is outright remarkable!

They have four babies in their care who normally wouldn’t get along. From the Daily Mail article, “The deadly enemies who are the best of friends,”

“Two Sumatran tiger cubs and two baby orang-utans, each pair abandoned by their mother soon after birth, have become inseparable playmates in the nursery room…

Nia and Irma happily snuggle up to the cubs in a way that five-month-old orang-utan sisters would never normally contemplate.”

In the wild, both species are endangered and Sumatran tigers, “might normally regard a baby orang-utan as a snack.”

And now for the adorable photos:

P.S. Many thanks to Neatorama, for posting this!

Funny how this video came up on one of my favorite blogs, because I’ve been meaning to talk about how tarsiers fit into the primate phylogeny.

But, I won’t get into that yet because this video of a little tarsier chowing down on some cricket is thoroughly entertaining:

A new statistical calculation called the hidden Markov model has been applied to four regions of the human, chimpanzee and gorilla genomes as reported in the PLoS Genetics journal.

But, before I jump into a discussion of the implications of this paper, let me explain to those unfamiliar with the hidden Markov model that it was,

“developed in the 1960s and originally applied to speech recognition.”

The calculation takes observable sequences, such as DNA from several genomes in this case, and seeks to fish out hidden parameters. It does this by isolating common genetic patterns from outliers throughout the genomes being compared. Of which the amount of difference and similarities can help calibrate a molecular clock. If you are curious about this statistical test, please check out Wikipedia’s entry on hidden Markov models.

In the paper, “Genomic Relationships and Speciation Times of Human, Chimpanzee, and Gorilla Inferred from a Coalescent Hidden Markov Model,” the authors analyze the results from these hidden Markov model calculations and claim their findings shifts the gap between human-chimpanzee divergence from 5-7 million years ago to around about 4 million years ago. Furthermore, they claim they have evidence that,

“it took only 400,000 years for humans to become a separate species from the common chimp-human ancestor.”

The abstract, if you care,

“The genealogical relationship of human, chimpanzee, and gorilla varies along the genome. We develop a hidden Markov model (HMM) that incorporates this variation and relate the model parameters to population genetics quantities such as speciation times and ancestral population sizes. Our HMM is an analytically tractable approximation to the coalescent process with recombination, and in simulations we see no apparent bias in the HMM estimates. We apply the HMM to four autosomal contiguous human–chimp–gorilla–orangutan alignments comprising a total of 1.9 million base pairs. We find a very recent speciation time of human–chimp (4.1 ± 0.4 million years), and fairly large ancestral effective population sizes (65,000 ± 30,000 for the human–chimp ancestor and 45,000 ± 10,000 for the human–chimp–gorilla ancestor). Furthermore, around 50% of the human genome coalesces with chimpanzee after speciation with gorilla. We also consider 250,000 base pairs of X-chromosome alignments and find an effective population size much smaller than 75% of the autosomal effective population sizes. Finally, we find that the rate of transitions between different genealogies correlates well with the region-wide present-day human recombination rate, but does not correlate with the fine-scale recombination rates and recombination hot spots, suggesting that the latter are evolutionarily transient.”

You maybe asking, how did they do this? Molecular clocks, friends, which I briefly mentioned above. Molecular clocks are effectively patterns in mutations in genomes that we expect to stay fairly consistent throughout evolutionary time. Previous molecular clocks, as reported on Time Tree, average for the time of nuclear divergence between human and chimpanzee lineages to be around 5.56 million years ago. The new hidden Markov model recalibrates, narrowing several parameters such as the time at which humans diverged from other ape lineages.

The following figures from the paper best portrary the results. You will see errors above the points plotted, and those are associated with the estimatation calculated via hiden Markov model. On the x-axis targets 1 refers to Chromosome 7, targets 106 to Chromosome 20, targets 121 to Chromosome 2, and 122 to Chromosome 20. The first is a population genetics parameter for time of divergence and the second time of speciation.

Note how a, or human chromosomes, sampled, consistently stays around 4mya.

Note how t1, or human chromosomes, compared, stays around 4mya, too. While the error bars are large, the study is pretty convincing. This study is also interesting.

It shows us that up until 4 million years ago, there was a lot of genetic introgression but a complete cessation of gene flow occurred abruptly. As John Lynch, from Stranger Fruit, points out,

“The age of 4.1 million years would apparently put the split during the time of such taxa as Australopithecus anamensis, A. afarensis and Kenyanthropus platyops. It will be interesting to see how this affects our current understanding of hominid evolution.”

Some news reports about this paper:

• Chimps, humans split only 4 million years ago
• Study moves chimp-human split to 4 million years ago

Animals that live in groups often break into smaller groups (fission), and later recongregate (fusion). Fission-fusion behavior is often tied to resource availability, but can also be related to social dynamics (competition among group members can lead to conflict, and breaking into smaller groups can alleviate the conflict). While fissioning into subgroups can relieve tension and conflict, bringing the subgroups back together can often be a trigger for aggression.

Spider monkeys live in groups, and break into smaller groups to hunt and eat. It has been noted for some time that when hunting parties return to the larger group, those returning often embrace the waiting spider monkeys.

Scientists from the UK studying two populatations of spider monkeys in the Yucatan have observed that the individuals who engage in this hugging are much less likely to behave in an aggressive fashion, either to each other or to others in the larger group.

Filippo Aureli and Collene Schaffner believe theirs is the first evidence for deliberate conflict management at fusion, and believe it may indicate the reason for similar greetings exhibited by other fission-fusion species such as spotted hyenas, bonobos, and humans.

References:

• Morell V (2007) Hug it out, Monkey. ScienceNOW 21Feb
• Aureli F and Schaffner CM (2007) Aggression and conflict management at fusion in spider monkeys. Biology Letters, Vol 3, no. 2. (published early online)

Alright, I’m assuming that if I need a break from our recent discussions on chimps using spears, stress & primate physiology, ethics, and new species then so do you. So, to break the monotony here’s a set of entertaining and heart-warming videos of one of Little Rock Zoo‘s gorilla families.

In the first video you will see Sekani, the mother, and Fossey, the big bad softy of a silverback dad, enjoying a play bout while 3 month old Mosi goes along for the ride. The second video, you will be seeing Fossey bonding with his little one. The videos show how gentile and docile gorillas can be to one another.

Please thank Daphne Brock Pfeiffer, one of the gorilla keepers for uploading this to YouTube and sharing this all with us. There is also a photo album of the trio up over here, I especially like this tender moment between father and child here.

Don’t expect this break to last very long, I’ll be posting about a new publication with reanlayzes the human divergence from other great apes, as well as a paper on primate brain evolution.

Two more things about the chimps using spears to hunt other primates.

Firstly, it looks like Christopher Mims is just as unsurprised as I have been about the news of the chimps using spears to hunt. He outlines why, in the form of what we already know about chimpanzees. I skimmed over these reasons, so here’s his list, albeit a bit truncated (you should check out his list for examples):

1. They use objects in their environment as tools.
2. Chimpanzees modify objects in order to make them more effective tools.
3. Tool use varies from one population of chimps to another–in other words, chimps exhibit variations in culture.
4. Chimps learn by observation and practice how to make and use tools–in part, they learn by imitation.

Amidst all this press and blogosphere hype it is good to have a voice of reason to outline that this is not particularly breakthrough research. All the other work both Christopher and I mentioned supports the fact that chimps are capable of this behavior, if not more.

The only truly extraordinary aspect of this finding is if chimps are really making spears, with a sidenote that females are hunting with spears more than males.
Which is the second thing I wanted to address in this post. The paper mentions the Savanna chimps exhibited spear making over 20 times, however they include only 1 image of a spear. You’d think they’d have several examples of spears, no? Also, the video I linked up didn’t quite capture the hunt. This is a bit curious.

I’ve uploaded the various clips the authors provided in the supplemental materials to the paper over on YouTube. You can judge for yourself what you see or don’t see. Here it is:

So the paper, I mentioned this morning, on chimpanzees hunting with spears has come out… and literally the entire blogosphere I know and track has reported on it. If that’s any indication that this is a remarkable finding to them, then so be it. By the way, Digg loves this news too.

To me this is an interesting finding, but nothing really new.

We have known for a long time chimpanzees use tools in one form or another. Chimpanzee tool use was documented by several primatologists in the field, such as stone tools to crack nuts and sticks used to fish ants and termites. The history, or rather prehistory, of chimpanzee tool use was supplemented with recent archaeological evidence that shows us chimpanzee tool use has been happening for thousands of years.

So what’s the big deal if chimps now also use ‘spears’ to hunt? To me it is just another tool used by a species of primate that has already been well documented as an intelligent organism.

The big deal is the authors of this Curent Biology paper, “Savanna Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes verus, Hunt with Tools” are claiming the chimps are actually making the spears, and not just selecting for sticks that would be good spears. If this is the case, then this is a critical behavior that distinguishes this form of tool use, from nut cracking. In nut cracking, chimpanzees select for stones that would be more effective in cracking nuts. They don’t particularly make stones that would be good nut crackers. The abstract reflects what they found and I’ve bolded the statements that I feel are particularly outstanding:

“Although tool use is known to occur in species ranging from naked mole rats to owls, chimpanzees are the most accomplished tool users. The modification and use of tools during hunting, however, is still considered to be a uniquely human trait among primates. Here, we report the first account of habitual tool use during vertebrate hunting by nonhumans. At the Fongoli site in Senegal, we observed ten different chimpanzees use tools to hunt prosimian prey in 22 bouts. This includes immature chimpanzees and females, members of age-sex classes not normally characterized by extensive hunting behavior. Chimpanzees made 26 different tools, and we were able to recover and analyze 12 of these. Tool construction entailed up to five steps, including trimming the tool tip to a point. Tools were used in the manner of a spear, rather than a probe or rousing tool. This new information on chimpanzee tool use has important implications for the evolution of tool use and construction for hunting in the earliest hominids, especially given our observations that females and immature chimpanzees exhibited this behavior more frequently than adult males.”

So there you have it, chimps make spears. More over, more female chimps make them than males… I’m sure my physical anthropology professor Adrienne Zihlman would like to read that.

I’ve gathered a list of other blogs who have reported on this paper at the time of my writing of this post, you should have a read and see what other people find interesting.

• Chimpanzees make and use spears from Tetrapod Zoology.
• Woman the Hunter? from The Loom.
• Chimps With Spears from Mixing Memory.

And from National Geographic News, ‘Chimps Use “Spears” to Hunt Mammals, Study Says‘ as well as a video, ‘Chimps Make and Use “Spears” to Hunt.’ According to the National Geographic News, one of the author’s work, Jill Pruetz, with chimpanzees will be featured in an upcoming NOVA/National Geographic special on PBS but the air date is not yet announced.

What’s this? Chimps hunt using spears?

That’s what the authors, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani, are reporting in a yet to be published paper in the journal Current Biology.

Since we don’t have the primary source, I’m relying on a news article published by the BBC News to share this with you. Here’s all I got so far:

“Chimpanzees in Senegal have been observed making and using wooden spears to hunt other primates… Researchers documented 22 cases of chimps fashioning tools to jab at smaller primates sheltering in cavities of hollow branches or tree trunks…. Chimps had not been previously observed hunting other animals with tools.”

This is an important finding, right on the coat tails of the report on the 4,300 year old stone tools used by chimps. I don’t know yet if this is a case where chimps fashioned spears or just selected for sticks that are effective spears (like the best stones that will be good anvils and hammers), but at the very minimum it expands our knowledge base on tool usage in non-human primates.

You can expect me to keep a diligent eye open for this publication. I’ll do my best to read it as soon as I get my grubby hands on it.