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Dominant baboons, the most 'confident' members of the tribe, are the least stress-prone. In short, the alphas of the group are cool, confident leaders who are able to relax about the place in the hierarchy. Low-stress, low-testosterone males were also more likely to show affection through social grooming while high-stress, high-testosterone males, just like their human counterparts, were more apt to suffer from stress-related diseases and exhibit aggressive and anxious behaviors (Sapolsky 167).
Sapolsky came to the Kenyan baboon tribe assuming to find some commonalities between the animal kingdom and primates. However, establishing intimacy with the baboons was more difficult than he anticipated, and at first he found himself in the uncomfortable position of shooting darts with anesthetizing blow guns. To compare the stress hormones between the different baboons required Sapolsky to behave almost like the type of big game hunter he despised. First, he had to watch his subjects interact in a group, observe their stress-related behaviors or lack thereof, track his subjects down, put them to sleep with a dart, carry them to the lab, and then take blood measurements to study animals scientifically, humans must distance themselves from the animal world and subdue animals -- that is the paradox of being an animal lover driven to become a behaviorist.
The need for distance as well as affection when studying animals can be a difficult balance to achieve: are those...
Yet even Sapolsky, after abandoning his early idealism, still wept for his uncooperative ape friends when the group suffered a plague and lost many of its members.
Despite his love for the creatures he studies, Sapolsky is not a sentimentalist about Africa. He portrays a world of local corruption, bureaucracy, civil strife, and tribal warfare. Negotiating local politics and performing scientific observation is not something primatologists train for: this struggle between African human civilization and the rights of animals eventually took Dian Fossey's life in Rwanda (Sapolsky 223). Although Sapolsky navigates this minefield with greater diplomacy than Fossey, in his estimation the rituals of the native warrior peoples and mire of Kenyan politics seem as strange, if not stranger, than that of the society of baboons, who also show compassion and violence to one another. Kenya underwent a failed coup during Sapolsky's studies. The world of politics and human life seems utterly separate from his focus on science, and the baboon's self-enclosed world. But while human politics may ebb and flow, the fundamental truths about human and animal nature Sapolsky strove to learn seem constant -- as is the desire of man to learn more about his closest ancestor, the primate.
Primate Behavior Research There can be big differences in the messages from a scholarly, or scientific, article and a main stream, or non-scientific article. The titles and the messages written in the articles can give readers entirely different meanings. The original article may state the study was done one way, but the main stream article tries to write in layman terms and may miss the entire meaning, or the way the
They have nails. The arms and legs are equal length. The Lincoln Park Zoo exhibit differs from its natural environment but is being upgraded. 6. Exhibits: The New World Monkeys appear to be more prominently displayed. The following species are featured in the Lincoln Park Zoo primate exhibit, including: a. Allen's swamp monkey (catarrhine, Allenopithecus nigroviridis, arboreal (tree-dwelling) but semi-terrestrial.) b. Black howler monkey (platyrrhine, Alouatta caraya, rain forests with near constant precipitation to
Phyllis Jay briefly touches on the subject of primates swimming in the book Behavior of Nonhuman Primates; in discussing the habitat of African monkeys, Jay writes (Jay, 1965, p. 535) that the "…distribution of arboreal monkeys is restricted by open, relatively treeless areas" and "rivers are barriers to arboreal monkeys but not to terrestrial forms, many of which swim" (Jay, p. 535). "Long-tailed macaques are excellent swimmers, and this may be
Primate Conservation The conservation of primates and their habitat is a point of major concern for many environmentalists, zoologists and even regular people that have an interest and/or passion for maintaining and sustaining wildlife. There is a litany of different reasons for primates and their conservation status being in danger and those will be covered in this report. Whether it be over-harvesting, habitat destruction or other things, there are many things
An important evolutionary distinction between primates and humans is that puberty and reproduction may begin in primates before the end of the juvenile stage. Comparison of the developmental stages experienced by both primates and humans has provided invaluable information regarding the evolution of both species. This information has allowed anthropologists and biologists to understand how humans successfully combined the features brought on by neoteny such as extended childhood, delayed reproduction
primates are more cognitively advanced than other mammals and that the degree of cognitive awareness and ability grows significantly from prosimians to humans. However, researchers still debate which parameters should be used to define and compare intelligence as well as the causal factors leading to this cognitive growth. Intelligence is a concept hard to define and even more difficult to test for in living species. In studying how human