Primatology.net

Primatology.net has a sister site, if you don’t know already, and that’s Anthropology.net. This evening I put up a post there that may interest any one keen to primate locomotion and/or human evolution. The post is specifically on orangutan locomotion, specifically on how some researchers have observed a set of Sumatran Orangutans exhibit bipedal tendencies.

If this sounds kinda sorta familiar to this very recent post, “On the biophysics of Sumatran orangutan swaying,” it is!  The same researchers that observed orangutans cheat the system and choose limbs that help them sway the best have published a new finding on bipedalism amongst the same population.

Before I jump into this article, I want to thank to Dave, one of our faithful visitors and commenters, who took the time to send us this Reuters news article on the current state of orangutan conservation. You should know already that orangutans are severely endangered, their populations are on the verge of genetic collapse, and the outlook for the ecosystem they inhabit is bleak.

All in all, it is a terrible situation.

Because of the logging industry and ultimately the destruction of rain forests in favor of cash crops, many orangutans have resorted to raiding palm oil plantations in Indonesia, Boreno, and Malayasia. Subsequently they are,

“branded pests for venturing out from their diminishing forest habitats into plantations where they eat young palm shoots.”

And because of this behavior, many Indonesians and Malaysians have a negative impression on orangutans. Lone Droscher-Nielsen, founder of the Nyaru Menteng Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS) center in Central Kalimantan describes how people will,

“Kill the [orangutans] if we don’t go [to save them] … It’s cheaper to kill the orangutan than put up a fence or snare.”

Lone has photographic evidence of people that cut the hands off apes, slashed to death with machetes, and others with bullets through their foreheads.

Again, orangutans are raiding the palm oil plantations because where the plantations are now were once orangutan stomping grounds. Since their habitat is now destroyed, and food is sparce, these animals are doing what every other animal does — raid the easiest food source possible.

Palm oil is a booming industry and is considered an alternative to pricey crude oil. But it is “deforestation diesel“! It is not sustainable because the destruction wreaked on rain forests is irreversible.

I see many problems that can be remedied in this situation. The biggest and most prevalent problem here is the impression Indonesians, Borneans, and Malaysians have on the orangutan. So long as they see this great ape as a pest there will be no significant conservation impact. Public relations and education can reverse this. People need to understand they are the ones being ‘pests’ in this situation.

Secondly, with the help of the UN, who has identified the problems with habitat destruction in Indonesia, governments need to regulate rain forest with a heavy hand. The Reuters article goes on to state how the rain forests being leveled are not just homes to orangutans. Many other species are at risk, and since rain forests are dense and diverse biomes – -the conservation of them are more important than just the fate of the organgutans.

Lastly, this goes out to those of us primate conservationist who aren’t in the hot zone. We must support conservation efforts. I’m not just making a plea to send money to places like Lone’s Boreno Orangutan Survival center. That’s one way to help, another way is to send emails, post in your blogs, and help spread the word about the current state of orangutan survival. More often than not, the best conservation efforts come about from the masses who send small amounts of support than the big donors.

Related Posts:

• Rebuilding forests in an effort to save orangutans in Borneo
• Detecting Human Caused Population Collapse in Orang-utans from Genetic Data
• UN Reports that Orangutan Habitat will be gone in 15 years

Remember when I talked about the current state of using chimpanzee’s in biomedical research? If not, let me refresh your memory. About five months ago, I over-viewed the reasons as to why the United States is not using chimps as a model organism in biomedical research. At the core of it all, the issue for the moratorium was not as much ethical as it was more fiscal. I wish the NIH also took a stance in regards to the other issues, such as the ethics, in this situation.

Ever since 1995, research chimps have been prevented from breeding. A final decision has been made by the National Institutes of Health that chimpanzees will no longer be breed for research, according to Reuters. Kathleen Conlee of the Humane Society has commented on the issue,

“This decision is a huge step towards a day when chimpanzees are no longer used in invasive biomedical research and testing.

This will spare some chimpanzees a life of up to 60 years in a laboratory. While it doesn’t help chimpanzees already living in laboratories, it is a monumental decision.

Our ultimate goal is to put an end (to) the use of chimpanzees in research and retire those chimpanzees to permanent and appropriate sanctuary.”

I’ve mentioned in the previous posts where I covered this debate that I’ve always been a bit torn about using chimps in research. Often, they are kept in cages and scrutinized to invasive surgeries and treatments. By no means is the research done on them humane, especially since I know the psychological and emotional capacities of chimpanzees first hand.

However, I also know that chimps used in biomedical research aren’t thought of as disposable beings. They are used as important and valuable models to help understand very serious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and cancer. While it’s not ethically just to subjugate a being to torture, it is not right to abandon hope for treating terminal illnesses. I wish it really didn’t need to be reduced down to a issue of the lesser of two evils, but that’s how many people see it. It will forever remain a polarizing topic to me.

Going back to the news I’m sharing with you, I am happy to report that the governing body, a faction of the NIH, isn’t gonna just neglect the remaining research chimps. They say they are commitmented to maintaining the existing chimpanzee facilities, including the federal sanctuary for chimpanzees that are no longer needed in biomedical research.

As you may have already noticed, I’ve decided to change our site’s name. I’ve done so because I own run Anthropology.net and want to match this site to that. Furthermore, Primatology.org is not so much an organization, as denoted by old the domain name. If anything we are a network of people interested in primatologists, thus Primatology.net is more fitting. Semantics really…

If you have any concerns that things will be dramatically changed, they won’t. URLs and links to Primatology.org will still function, but they will forward to Primatology.net automatically. I have a concern that our Technorati rank may drop, as well as our current rank as #2 on Google’s search for Primatology. If they do, then so be it — can’t have it all.

I hope y’all still visit regularly and post thought-provoking comments.

I consider Pakinson’s a very devastating neurodegenerative disease because the affected individuals are fully aware of their degeneration. Unlike Alzheimer’s, where individuals become jaded as the disease progresses, individuals with Parkinson’s are very conscious of what’s happening or actually what’s not functioning correctly — and they can’t do a thing about it!

So some new findings from a biomedical/neurological experiment has just come out where the authors implanted dopamine generators (dopaminergics) into brain cells of macaques. They noted these new generators improved the symptoms of Parkinson’s. Here is a summary of the methods and findings,

“the research was extended to a greater number of non- human primates and for a longer period of time. The procedure involved implanting cell fragments extracted from the carotid body in the striate area of the brain. The carotid body is a small structure located at the bifurcation of the carotid artery, at the level of the neck. Its function is to control the rhythm of respiration and the cardiac frequency through releasing dopamine in situations of low oxygen level in the blood. After the implantation of the cellular aggregates of the carotid body into the striate area of the brain, the improvement in movement in monkeys with Parkinson’s and which had received transplants was demonstrated to last for at least a year.

The research team concluded that the mechanism by which the implants in the striate area of the brain of dopamine-generating cells manage to ameliorate Parkinson’s appears to be related to the capacity of these cells to release substances (trophic factors) that induce an increase of the dopaminergic cells (that usually exist in the normal brain but in lower quantities). Amongst these trophic factors is the GNDF (Glial Cell-derived Neurotrophic Factor).

Cells extracted from the carotid body have been used as a source for dopaminergic cells in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease in animal experiments and in humans. The advantage of this cell type with respect to others is the possibility of carrying out autoimplants, thus avoiding tissue rejection or immunosupressor treatment.”

Personally, I consider this an ethical use of primates in research. Firstly, the cause is noble in my opinion. Parkinson’s is a horrible disease, and in this situation, work done on a primate model has shown us a possible way to treat the disease by inserting doapamine generators. While, I think it will be a while until we actually do that in humans, this research has allowed a possible treatment to be investigated.

If you wanna read the entire publication, here is the a link to the paper, “Modification of the number and phenotype of striatal dopaminergic cells by carotid body graft.”

The following post is a departure from my usual reporting on an interesting primate related tidbit of research. I’ll be posting about how I have thought about how to study primate brain evolution research. These are just ideas I have brainstormed. It is very probable that people are doing this out in their respective labs but I’m not in the know of what’s totally current. I hope you are interested in what scope of primate brain evolution research I will be discussion… I’ll be mostly taking in a functional genomic and computational biology approach, but that’s not to say more objective sciences such as psychology can’t fit into this game plan.

To start off, understanding primate brain evolution, specifically the biological mechanisms by how the primate brains have been positively selected for by size involves two complementary aspects of research. One of it is to identify the genes involved in brain growth and development, as well as their expression patterns. This is wet lab work, a whole lot of tissue sampling, mRNA isolation, cDNA synthesis and RT-PCR amplification, gene quantification and qualification and ultimately sequencing. At this level, one would need to sample multiple samples of representative primates (that have their genomes sequenced) and different developmental stages and populations.

Once these key players can be identified, the functions of these genes need to be well understood. Of course making knockout monkeys will be a costly and time consuming endeavor full of ethical issues, so I imagine having knockout neuron cultures can help understand the function of these genes better when they aren’t expressed. That’s a bit hard, neurons are awfully fickle to grown in culture. Maybe reporter constructs? Also, other non-traditional research such as sequence homology to other known proteins can help isolate potential functions based on structure.

Now once these key developmental genes have been classified, their relative importance should be noted… or in other words, one needs to organize which genes are specific to all primates and which are specific to fewer primates. Do these genes correlate with the known lineage of primates? If a unique pattern can be extracted, this will make the second aspect of research much easier and conclusive. This is the computational biology approach, using computers, statistics, and other mathematical models to identify what genes were mutated the most to yield the most growth. What genes remained fairly consistent? Can we estimate ages of coalescence or divergence, are there unique mutations to populations or species of primates… ultimately can we begin to make a phylogenetic tree of these genes and their changes throughout evolutionary time?

As I currently laid it out, these two field complement each other and if anything one is dependent on the other. Currently, I know of computational studies that seem to search high and low to find genes that have been positively selected for in primates by scanning and comparing entire genomes. If a hit is found, the research then shifts backwards to estimate functions based on the sequence homology to other known genes and their functions. While that maybe a useful, quick and easy approach, it’s all sorts of wrong. It is wrong because it is the needle in the haystack method. I advise one first narrow down the list, by doing the functional genomic screens, which is arduous and tedious, but much more quantitative and thorough. That way, one can limit things down to candidate genes specific to a species, developmental stage, etc. The playing field will be much more narrow and the computations will be much more conclusive.

What do you think? Do I have it right, do I have it wrong? Not to be rubbing my ego, but I think I have a thorough plan here — one that would make the most killer dissertation ever. Do you know of any researchers doing it this way? If any one out there, who reads this blog, carries out primate brain evolution research please feel free to comment and discuss. I’m really curious to know if what I have been thinking is even right.

For you osteology buffs out there, I want to let you know about the Digital Morphology database, if you don’t already know about it. I actually didn’t know about it myself, until I read about an extinct platyrrhine, Tremacebus harringtoni, from Afarensis’ ‘know your primate‘ periodical. The Digital Morphology (DigiMorph) database currently has about 400 species listed. If you are wondering what the database specializes in, I think the name should give you a clue as well as my shout-out to all y’all osteologists… but here’s a more formal introduction from their website,

“Digital Morphology library is a dynamic archive of information on digital morphology and high-resolution X-ray computed tomography of biological specimens. Browse through the site and see spectacular imagery and animations and details on the morphology of many representatives of the Earth’s biota.”

This database is brought to you by the University of Texas at Austin, and is an excellent execution of organization and quality, structured content. I personally love this resource. I see it as a supplement to many fields.

I also personally appreciate it because I like to see biological data be shared freely. Databases like Genbank have paved the way for natural scientists and medical professionals to share genomic data and sequences. But their data is relatively more easy to share. Agreeing upon a uniform structure to share sequence data is straight-forward – a sequence is a sequence is a sequence. It’s really kinda hard to mess up sharing raw-text data.

But, databases that specialize in phenotypes or physical characteristics of living things have proved to be more challenging. Agreeing upon uniform data fields has become one of the major challenges because there is sooo much variation. If you think about, the only fields we could effectively really categorize some living things are the major distinctions between the three major domains. Secondly, is the logistical aspects of it. Many ways we could gather phenotypic data is locked away in many museums and institutions. Some have restricted access, and to overcome the bureaucratic loopholes to get access to a skeleton is almost as hard as agreeing upon a way to structure the database. Another logistical challenge is how to document the phenotype. Photographs may seem logical, but they aren’t. First come image resolution and photographic skills. These variables can ultimately affect quality control.

And that’s where the DigiMorph’s X-ray tomography comes in. Data is totally digital and uniform. It is not related to how the photographer stages the specimen nor the quality of the camera used.

So, I’m pretty sure you are wondering, after all this blabbering and cheerleading I have done, of what importance is this to you as someone interested in primatology?

Well, if you study functional anatomy, how an animal’s body form relates to its function in life, this database is for you… especially if you do not have access to a laboratory with comparative samples! For example, you can analyze the sexual dimorphisms between a male and female tufted capuchin skulls on your own computer. I’ve plucked two lateral views of each skull for you to give it a run. Ask yourselves what differences do you see between the male and female skull? If you can make these observation I think you can see how this database is pretty nifty — cuts out the hours spent with a caliper and sketching bones out in a lab that may not have what you need!

Anyways, I hope you also find DigiMorph useful. If you want to browse their primate collection, their mammals category seems to be the deepest taxonomic level to get to the monkeys, apes, tarsiers, etc.

From time to time I like to put up a funny primate related piece of media to break the monotony that sometimes is ‘hardcore’ science. Considering, we just had a row of such material, here’s a video that you may enjoy. I for one got a good chuckle out of it.

Though sometimes the animals behind these videos go thru excruciating training regiments (which are sometimes very abusive), I can’t help but love the Japanese for making the most amusing and creative game/comedy shows ever… especially when they involve chimpanzees and bulldogs.

Hat tip to Betsy!

Since primate brains and sexual dimorphism are topics that are still fresh on our minds after this morning’s post, I figured I should let you know about a new publication that came out of the open access journal BMC Biology on the differences between male and female primate brain structures and how they developed. It ain’t paleoprimatology in any sense, it’s straight up primtate neuroscience.

In “Primate brain architecture and selection in relation to sex” authors,

“Patrik Lindenfors, Charles Nunn and Robert Barton [we wrote about Dr. Barton before, here] examined data on primate brain structures in relation to traits important for male competition, such as greater body mass and larger canine teeth. The researchers also took into account the typical group size of each sex for individual primate species in order to assess sex-specific sociality – the tendency to associate with others and form social groups. The researchers then studied the differences between 21 primate species, which included chimpanzees, gorillas, and rhesus monkeys, using statistical techniques that incorporate evolutionary processes.”

What they found is pretty important, in my opinion. They have concluded that differences between primate sexes cause developmental effects on the brain, and that is due to different pressures on males and females to keep up with social or competitive demands. From News-Medical.net,

“The authors found that sexual selection had an important influence on primates brains. Greater male-on-male competition (sexual selection) correlated with several brain structures involved with autonomic functions, sensory-motor skills and aggression. Where sexual selection played a greater role the septum was smaller, and therefore potentially exercised less control over aggression.

In contrast, the average number of females in a social group correlates with the relative size of the telencephalon (or cerebrum), the largest part of the brain. The telencephalon includes the neocortex, which is responsible for higher functions such as sensory perception, generation of motor commands and spatial reasoning. Primates with the most sociable females evolved a larger neocortex, suggesting that female social skills may yield the biggest brains for the species as a whole. Social demands on females and competitive demands on males require skills handled by different brain components, the authors suggest. The contrasting brain types, a result of behavioural differences between the sexes, might be a factor in other branches of mammalian brain evolution beyond anthropoid primates, too.”

I’ve bolded the conclusions that I consider the most impacting. While, I’m weary about the how this applies to humans, I cannot deny the correlations the authors have derived. Research like this is fundamental to understanding the physical origin of very complicated social behaviors, and the authors provide us with a map of primate brains and how they correlate to sex related behaviors.

As far as how this impacts humanity — I believe human brain development is much more complex and social issues and culture imprint human brain development to a much greater degree in humans as compared to non human primates. So it’s a bit hard to say, in my opinion again, that this model of sex-selection and number of females really impact the developments of our brains.

From the paleoprimatology department comes news that a second intact cranium of Aegyptopithecus zeuxis has been found and is, ‘”extraordinarily unusual,” …mainly because it’s complete and uncrushed.’ This fossil cranium is important because tells us a lot about what was going on with primate brain evolution many million years ago.

The fossil cranium was found by Elwyn Simons, a primatologist at Duke University, and his colleagues. Aegyptopithecus zeuxis is around 30 million years old and believed to be an old world monkey. From National Geographic News,

“The completeness of the fossil skull allowed Simons and colleagues to take computerized x-rays and create a virtual model of the specimen’s tiny brain.

Based on analyses of previous fossil skulls collected at the dig site outside Cairo…, scientists had assumed the ancient monkey’s brain was larger and more advanced.

The new fossil indicates Aegyptopithecus had a relatively primitive brain compared to its descendants…

Nevertheless, the brain region responsible for vision, called the visual cortex, was large. This suggests that, like many primates, Aegyptopithecus had good vision.”

From the x-ray scan, Simons and team also found out there was a great degree of sexual dimorphism… an anatomical size phenomenon between males and females. In this situation the newly discovered fossil was a ‘female, which may have weighed about 5.5 pounds (2.5 kilograms)’ while the older Aegyptopithecus was a male, twice the size.

Dean Falk, an anthropologist that specializes in primate brain evolution, specifically hominid brain evolution, commented on the finding. She said this finding,

“”challenges “perceived truths” that large brain size was required for things like daytime activity and living in large social groups.

“[The new study] is saying you don’t have increased brain size back when you have some of these things,” she said.

In fact, Falk believes the virtual model of Aegyptopithecus’ brain, used in the new study, suggests the brain was even less advanced than the researchers propose.

However, Falk agrees that the brain model does confirm an enlarged area for vision, suggesting good eyesight was important early on for our ancestors.”

From what I am gathering this is an important conclusion that implies the primate brain expanded vision before it enlarged anywhere else. Of course more fossil primate skulls could support that or show that this feature happened in the Aegyptopithecus lineage.

The results of the x-ray analysis of Aegyptopithecus have apparently been published in PNAS, a journal notorious for letting press releases come out way before the actual publication. That being said, I don’t have a link to the actual publication as of now.