I’m scouring the American Journal of Primatology for a paper on gorillas using tools as weapons in the wild. National Geographic News says the paper is out, but I can’t find it anywhere in the early edition nor in the current issues. I’ll continue looking, but in the mean time here’s what we got to [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Macaque’
September 13, 2007
Baby Macaque and White Pigeon make friends
With all the depressing news of gorillas being slaughtered and primates being brought closer to extinction, I wanted to share this photograph of an abandoned baby macaque, who was taken in by an animal hospital in Goangdong Province, China. He was very lonely until he made friends with a white pigeon.
In many cultures, the white [...]
September 7, 2007
Nonhuman Primates Expect Rational Behavior
From this news release, is this Science paper, “The Perception of Rational, Goal-Directed Action in Nonhuman Primates” where Justin Wood of Harvard’s Psychology department and colleagues., figure out that primates expect one another to act rationally. How?
Well Wood and crew setup two sets of experiments that tested the behavioral response of over 120 primates, including [...]
July 21, 2007
Ecotourism is causing infant mortality among Tibetan Macaques
According news bite of a long term study of Tibetan macaques (Macaca thibetana) in the Mount Huangshan Scenic Area of China’s Anhui Province, ecotourism is doing more harm than good. In the October edition of the International Journal of Primatology, the results of a 19 year long study will show that skyrocketing infant mortality coincided [...]
June 4, 2007
Rhesus Macaques are Statisticians
There’s new research coming out from Nature that shows us rhesus macaques are really tuned into statistics and probabilities, they may even have neurons specialized to calculate probabilities. But don’t get your hopes up too high… these monkeys will not be your bookies or be crunchin’ gout some gnarly ANOVA tests with p-value significance.
What you [...]
May 22, 2007
Using Macaques to treat Parkinson’s Disease
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 [...]
May 15, 2007
Sexual selection and its influence on primates brains
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 [...]
May 9, 2007
A SNP Resource for Rhesus Macaque (Macaca mulatta) Genomics
I’m posting this as I run out the door, so forgive me if it is a bit brief and incomplete in explanation… but I have to share this resource/paper with you because less than 1 month ago the Macaque genome draft was released, and this publication is the first application, I know, of the draft [...]
April 12, 2007
Science magazine unveils the Macaque Genome
Science just published a whole slew of papers, posters, news articles, and the like on the Rhesus Macaque because the macaque genome, the first monkey genome to be sequenced, has been unveiled today.
I haven’t read all of the content in this special issue, but from what I have skimmed so far it’s all focused on [...]
March 19, 2007
On primate behavior and tracing back the origins of morality
Personally, I have my own beef with sociobiology a.k.a. evolutionary psychology. I have yet to see it venture from a story telling, subjective science. But my issues don’t prevent me from acknowledging and respecting progressive work done in this subfield of behavioral studies and primatology.
I don’t know where Nick Wade truly stands about sociobiology, but [...]
