Traverías, Radio Exterior - RNE, Miquel Llorente, Fundación Mona: los chimpancés se comunican a través del lenguaje gestual

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Roger Fouts y la comunicación de los chimpancés en CosmoCaixa Barcelona

El próximo 4 de mayo impartirá una conferencia en CosmoCaixa Barcelona  con el título “Conversando con chimpancés. Cómo la lengua de signos borra la separación entre ellos y nosotros”

El 5 de mayo realizará una visita al Centro de Recuperación de Primates de la Fundación Mona para conocer el trabajo que se lleva a cabo en la rehabilitación y resocialización de primates.

Ya han pasado cuatro años de la muerte de Washoe, la primera chimpancé que aprendió (y enseñó) la lengua de signos para comunicarse con los humanos y con otros chimpancés. Gracias a Washoe, y al resto de su familia chimpancé, se derribó otro de los muros que separaba a humanos de primates: el lenguaje. Roger S. Fouts y Deborah H. Fouts, del Instituto de Comunicación entre Humanos y Chimpancés de la Central Washington University, hablarán de todo ello el próximo 4 de mayo a las 18.30h en CosmoCaixa Barcelona. El objetivo de la charla no solo es dar a conocer las investigaciones que realizaron en los años 70 del siglo XX sobre las capacidades lingüísticas de los chimpancés, sino también exponer las últimas novedades sobre las “lenguas”, dialectos y sistemas gestuales de comunicación de los chimpancés salvajes.

La conferencia se enmarca dentro de los actos de celebración del 10º aniversario de Fundación Mona. En palabras de Olga Feliu, Directora de MONA: “Para nosotros es un honor que el Prof. Fouts haya querido participar en esta conferencia y en venir a conocer nuestro Centro de Recuperación. Siempre es un honor y un orgullo que primatólogos de renombre como los Fouts se interesen por el trabajo que desde hace una década venimos desarrollando para proteger, conservar y rehabilitar a los primates no humanos”. “Una de los aspectos más positivos de los Fouts – prosigue Feliu -  es que han sabido combinar su interés por la investigación con la protección y defensa de los derechos de los primates en particular y los animales en general”. Tal como comenta el Dr. Miquel Llorente, Responsable de Investigación de MONA e investigador del IPHES (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social): “su visita no es sólo una gran oportunidad para conocer de primera mano los trabajos pioneros sobre capacidades lingüísticas en grandes simios, sino que también será una ocasión inmejorable para poder mostrarle nuestra manera de trabajar en la que combinamos investigación con bienestar animal”.

La conferencia de los Fouts coincidirá con presentación de una exposición fotográfica conmemorativa del 10º aniversario de Fundación Mona que estará presente en CosmoCaixa durante aquella semana.

Detalles de la Conferencia:

Lugar: CosmoCaixa Barcelona. C/ Isaac Newton, 26. 08022 Barcelona

Horario: 18.30h.

Precio: Actividad gratuita. Plazas limitadas. Es necesario reservar la plaza a través de la web de CosmoCaixa

Idioma: Inglés. Servicio de traducción simultánea

Más información:

www.laCaixa.es/ObraSocial

comunicacio@fundacionmona.org; 972 477 618

Chimp’s Sex Calls May Reflect Calculation

By NICHOLAS WADE

Intricate as the mating dance may be among people, for other primates like chimpanzees and baboons it is even more complicated. This is evident from the work of researchers who report that the distinctive calls made by female chimpanzees during sex are part of a sophisticated social calculation.

Biologists have long been puzzled by these copulation calls, which can betray the caller’s whereabouts to predators. To compensate for this hazard, the calls must confer a significant evolutionary advantage, but what?

The leading explanation involves the way female primates protect their offspring. Male chimps and baboons are prone to kill any infant they believe could not be theirs, so females try to blur paternity by mating with as many individuals as possible before each conception. A side benefit is that by arranging to have sperm from many potential fathers compete for her egg, the female creates conditions for the healthiest male to father her child.

The calls that female chimps make during sex seemed to be just part of this strategy. By advertising a liaison in progress, biologists assumed, females stood to recruit many more partners.

But the study, by Simon Townsend, Tobias Deschner and Klaus Zuberbühler, shows that in making calls or not, the females take the social situation into account.

The researchers monitored the lively love lives of seven female chimps in the Budongo Forest of Uganda, making audio recordings of nearly 300 copulations. In two-thirds of these encounters, they found, the female made no sound at all. This finding undermines the thesis that the principal purpose of copulation calls is to instigate rivalry among males, the researchers reported online Tuesday in the scientific journal PLoS One.

Unlike female baboons, who give a staccato whoop at each copulation, the chimps seem much more aware of the social context. Chimps are particularly likely to be silent and conceal their liaisons when higher-ranking females are nearby. They were most acoustically exuberant when cavorting with a high-ranking male.

The reason may be that other higher-ranking males are likely to be around, too, and by advertising her availability to them a female chimp may gain many influential protectors for her future infant.

The calculus changes when higher-ranking females are around because they are likely to attack the caller and break up the fun. To avoid incest, young females leave their home group and try to integrate with neighbors by offering themselves to socially important males. But the resident females tend to be obstructive, perhaps because they see them as competitors for male protectors and desirable feeding areas.

A similar use of copulation calls could once have existed in the human lineage but if so, it may have lost its evolutionary advantages when human societies developed their distinctive system of pair bonding and made intercourse a largely private activity.

Dorothy Cheney, an animal behavior expert at the University of Pennsylvania, said that copulation calls usually occurred in primate species where the females have visible sexual swellings during their receptive period. Because swellings do not occur in humans, it is hard to speculate about the relevance of chimp sexual calls to human behavior, Dr. Cheney said.

Though human vocalizations during intercourse have not been much studied, they do have “a quite elaborate acoustical structure, which suggests some kind of communicative function,” said Dr. Townsend, who is at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Copulation calls are not a feature of public life in Western societies, but the situation could be different in hunter-gatherer groups, which enjoy little privacy.

“I can imagine that these sort of signals may still be very much perceived by other group members and give a female a high degree of control over her willingness to copulate or let others know her sexual state,” said Dr. Zuberbühler, also of the University of St. Andrews.

The female primate’s strategy of blurring paternity could be useful in human societies, too, especially when the rate of illegitimacy is high. “Whether or not this happens in humans I don’t know,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar went on.”

Female chimpanzees have sexual swellings that remain visible for several days, but they ovulate on just one day. A female gives her copulation calls throughout the period, concealing her most fertile time from the males.

“If she was truly interested in meeting with the best males, she should do all her calling during that narrow window when it matters,” Dr. Zuberbühler said. “But she doesn’t. She conceals the time of ovulation by calling throughout her cycle.”

Ape Gestures Offer Clues To The Evolution Of Human Communication

Chimp reaching out. (Credit: Frans de Waal / Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University)

ScienceDaily (May 1, 2007) — Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have found bonobos and chimpanzees use manual gestures of their hands, feet and limbs more flexibly than they do facial expressions and vocalizations, further supporting the evolution of human language began with gestures as the gestural origin hypothesis of language suggests. This study appears in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Working with two groups of bonobos (13 animals) and two groups of chimpanzees (34 animals), Yerkes researchers Amy Pollick, PhD, and Frans de Waal, PhD, distinguished 31 manual gestures and 18 facial/vocal signals. They found both species used facial/vocal signals similarly, but the same did not hold true for the manual gestures. Rather, the researchers found both within and between species the manual gestures were less closely tied to a particular emotion and, thereby, serve a more adaptable function. For example, a single gesture may communicate an entirely different message depending upon the social context in which it is used.

"A chimpanzee may stretch out an open hand to another as a signal for support, whereas the same gesture toward a possessor of food signals a desire to share," said Pollick. "A scream, however, is a typical response for victims of intimidation, threat or attack. This is so for both bonobos and chimpanzees, and suggests the vocalization is relatively invariant," Pollick continued.

By studying similar types of communication in closely related species, researchers are able to determine shared ancestry. We know gestures are evolutionarily younger than facial expressions and vocalizations, as shown by their presence in apes and humans but not in monkeys. "A gesture that occurs in bonobos and chimpanzees as well as humans likely was present in the last common ancestor," said Pollick. "A good example of a shared gesture is the open-hand begging gesture, used by both apes and humans. This gesture can be used for food, if there is food around, but it also can be used to beg for help, for support, for money and so on. It's meaning is context-dependent," added de Waal.

Looking for further distinctions between species, the researchers found bonobos use gestures more flexibly than do chimpanzees. "Different groups of bonobos used gestures in specific contexts less consistently than did different groups of chimpanzees," said Pollick. The researcher's findings also suggest bonobos and chimpanzees engage in multi-modal communication, combining their gestures with facial expressions and vocalizations to communicate a message. "While chimpanzees produce more of these combinations, bonobos respond to them more often. This finding suggests the bonobo is a better model of symbolic communication in our early ancestors," concluded Pollick.

Adapted from materials provided by Emory University.

Why did the monkey pee on his feet?

Published online: 7 September 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070903-18

Study helps to answer question of odd primate behaviour.

Matt Kaplan

Monkey pee: rubbing urine on the hands could be a way of seeking attention. Katalin Laszlo

It may seem strange, but many monkeys wash their hands and feet with urine. Researchers now think they know why.

Since this odd behaviour was first observed, explanatory theories have varied wildly from suggesting that it helps monkeys improve their grip when climbing to saying it is a method of cleaning. One widely supported theory argues that monkeys use urine washing to cool themselves down when temperatures get too high.

But new research hints that it's all about social communication.

The notion of animals using chemical scents to communicate with each other is hardly new. Dogs classically use urine to mark their territory, for example, as do many other creatures. But when it comes to peeing on oneself, researchers had thought physiological reasons might be as important as social ones. It seems they were wrong.

Hot times

Primatologist Kimran Miller and her research colleagues at the National Institutes of Health Animal Center in Poolesville, Maryland, monitored capuchin monkeys for ten months in a captive environment. The researchers would record daily the enclosure temperature and humidity and then note rates of urine washing. Their report, to be published in the American Journal of Primatology, shows that urine washing behaviours did not change with either temperature or humidity.

Instead, Miller and her team noticed a link between urine washing and attention-seeking.

Alpha males, for example, doubled their urine washing rates when being solicited by females. The researchers think this might be how males encourage females to continue paying attention once they've started.

And in 87% of fights or aggressive incidents, the loser of the battle washed in urine. The team suspects that this is also an attention-seeking behaviour — in this case seeking sympathy. But more research is needed to be sure.



"This really challenges the dominant theory that urine washing in capuchins is related to thermoregulation," comments primatologist James Anderson at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

"We see antelope that pee on their throats, vultures that poop on their feet, and monkeys that wash their hands in urine," says behavioural endocrinologist Fred Bercovitch at the centre for Conservation and Research for Endangered Species in San Diego. "It's obvious that urination is about more than elimination and it is great to see research like this that is figuring out why."