Primate Behavior and Conservation Field Course in Costa Rica

Hiring Organization:
State University of New York, Oneonta and DANTA: Association for Conservation of the Tropics

Date Posted:
2006-11-15

Position Description:
The State University of New York at Oneonta and Danta: Association for Conservation of the Tropics are pleased to announce a Primate Behavior and Conservation Field Course to be held in Costa Rica from June 12, to July 11, 2007. This program is open to people of all academic backgrounds. Participants may enroll on either a credit or non-credit basis. Also, an optional ecotravel experience will be provided for those who wish to stay longer for travel after the course.
The course will be held at El Zota Biological Field Station in North-eastern Costa Rica. The course is designed to provide students with training in primate behavior, ecology and conservation in a field setting. During the first half of the course, students will learn how to (1) collect data on the behavior of free-ranging primates, (2) measure environmental variables, including assessment of resource availability, (3) measure population size, and (4) map the field site. In the second half of the course, in consultation with the instructor, each student carries out an independent research project. Students in the past have investigated such topics as feeding ecology, positional behavior, and habitat use in the mantled howler monkey, white-faced capuchin and black-handed spider monkey. Students will be involved in applied conservation during a 6 day field trip to Puerto Viejo and Punta Mona.

The cost of the course is $1850, and includes all within-country transportation, room and board, and expenses for a 6 day field trip. It does NOT include your international flight, airport taxes ($25), accommodation and meals for the first and last nights in San Jose. The deadline for registration is May 1, 2007. Enrollment is limited to 25 participants.

To learn more about the Primate Behavior and Conservation field course, please visit our website (www.danta.info), or email us at dingeska@oneonta.edu.

Qualifications/Experience:
The course is intended for undergraduates or early graduate level students who are very interested in tropical biology, but have little or no experience of working in a tropical environment.

Application Deadline:
May 1, 2007

Contact Information:
Kimberly Dingess
31 Pine Street
Oneonta, NY 13820
USA

Telephone Number:
607-432-0315

Website:
http://www.danta.info

E-mail Address:
dingeska@oneonta.edu

Exposición "Atapuerca i l'evolució humana" , en Girona

Exposició "Atapuerca i l'evolució humana"
Dirigida per Juan Luis Arsuaga, codirector de l'Equip d'Investigacions d'Atapuerca, la mostra ha estat creada pels investigadors per acostar als ciutadans la realitat d'un dels projectes científics més rellevants del nostre país. Es podrà visitar fins al 21 de gener de 2007, de dilluns a diumenge de 10 a 14 h i de 16 a 20 h.


Horaris:
Tancat els dies: 25,26 i 31 de desembre i l’1 i 6 de gener. També tancat les tardes de 24 de desembre i del 5 de gener.

Tallers:
Els taller es faran els dies 25, 26 de novembre, el 2, 3, 16 i 17 de desembre i el 13 i 14 de gener. Monitors de suport.
Dia 25, taller d’arqueologia de 12 a 13,30 i el de paleontologia, de 18 a 19,30.
Dia 26, taller d’art prehistòric de 12 a 13,30.
Dia 2 i 3, els mateixos horaris del cap de setmana 25 i 26.
Dia 16 i 17, els mateixos horaris del cap de setmana 25 i 26.
Dia 13 i 14, els mateixos horaris del cap de setmana 25 i 26.

Visites guiades:
OBERTES: Les visites es faran cada dia a les 7 de la tarda.
Els dissabtes i festius se’n farà dues : una al matí a les 12 i una al vespre a les 7. (possibilitat d’ampliar a 2 a les tardes).
ESCOLARS: a petició (presumiblement en horari de 10 a 12 o de 15 a 16).

La mostra està organitzada per la Fundació Caixa de Catalunya i Casa de Cultura. Per a més informació: 972.20.20.13

Funding opportunity

Primate Conservation, Incorporated (PCI) is a nonprofit foundation founded to fund field research that supports conservation programs for wild populations of primates. Priority will be given to projects that study, in their natural habitat, the least known and most endangered species. The involvement of citizens from the country in which the primates are found will be a plus. The intent is to provide support for original research that can be used to formulate and to implement conservation plans for the species studied.

PCI will grant seed monies or provide matching grants for graduate students, qualified conservationists, and primatologists to study rare and endangered primates and their conservation in their natural habitat. All appropriate projects will be considered, but the regions of current interest are Asia and West Africa.

http://fundingopps.cos.com/alerts/61631?id=61631&if=alert
http://www.primate.org/grant_in.htm

Ray Hamel
Wisconsin Primate Center Library
Phone: 608-263-3512
hamel@primate.wisc.edu

Not Just Nuts and Berries for These Hominids

By Ann Gibbons
ScienceNOW Daily News
9 November 2006

The robust australopithecines of South Africa are often described as failed humans, having died out 1 million to 1.4 million years ago. Researchers believe their high-fiber, low-nutrient diets might have been too specialized to allow them to cope with a changing environment. A new report in tomorrow's issue of Science challenges this assumption, however, arguing that these close cousins of humans were much more culinarily adventurous than thought.

With their huge molars and massive jaw muscles, australopithecines have been portrayed as nutcrackers who crunched their way through seeds, nuts, and pulpy fruits. As Africa grew cooler and drier, however, these critical fall-back foods were hard to come by, supposedly leading to the hominid's downfall.

To test this theory, a team of American and British researchers studied the teeth of four individuals of Paranthropus robustus (also known as Australopithecus robustus) from the Swartkrans Cave in South Africa. The team scanned the teeth with a sensitive laser, which did not destroy the teeth but etched them lightly enough to free carbon gases long trapped in the enamel. Because different plants absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide differently, the researchers were able to see what types of vegetation the hominids ate based on the ratio of carbon isotopes in their teeth.

Their cuisine included a mix of tropical grasses and sedges, along with woody fruits, shrubs, and herbs, according to the findings. What's more, carbon samples from ridges laid down like tree rings in a single tooth revealed that the hominids switched between these diverse plants, depending on the time of year. The pattern held, regardless of when the hominids lived. Although the specimens date back to about 1.8 million years ago, each individual's lifetime was probably separated by thousands or tens of thousands of years, indicating that Paranthropus robustus was quite capable of dealing with changes in climate or different habitats. "We didn't expect to see as much variability as we found," says lead author Matt Sponheimer of University of Colorado at Boulder. "It was quite a surprise."

The new method is a huge improvement over old isotopic studies that required anthropologists to drill--and destroy--teeth to sample carbon, like prehistoric dentists, says paleoanthropologist Fred Grine of the Stony Brook University in New York. "Sponheimer's taken the analysis of carbon isotopes in fossils to a new level of sophistication," he says, adding that he hopes that fossil teeth--and diets--of earlier hominids can also be studied with the new nondestructive method.

Fuente: Science: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/1109/1?etoc

XXXth International Ethological Conference

The XXXth International Ethological Conference will be held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada from 15-23 August 2007. The web page for the conference is http://iec2007.psychology.dal.ca/ . I attended the conference in August of 2005 in Budapest, Hungary and it was quite good. In 2007, there appears to be a number of Plenary talks that are directly applicable to at least aspects of Evolutionary Psychology. I'm tentatively planning to go. It is quite a large, international meeting with people from many countries attending.

The list of Plenary Speaker to date are as follows:

CURRENT LIST OF PLENARY SPEAKERS:

Opening Public lecture

Hal Whitehead, Dalhousie University, Canada.
"Adventures of a marine mammalogist in the study of whale language
and culture"

Plenary lectures (tentative titles)

1. Patrick Bateson, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge,
England
"Developmental Plasticity and Epigenetics"

.

2. Pat Monaghan, University of Glasgow, Scotland.
"Growth, lifespan and life history trade-offs"

3. Elisabetta Visalberghi, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della
Cognizione, Rome, Italy
"Behavioral, cognitive and ecological factors affecting tool use in
wild capuchin monkeys"

4. Atsushi Iriki, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan.
"Brain mechanism for development and evolution of monkey tool-use as
a latent precursor of human intelligence"

5. Roger T. Hanlon, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, USA
"Masters of optical illusion: the neuroethology of rapid adaptive
camouflage and communication in cephalopods"

6. Horst Bleckmann, Institut für Zoologie der Universität Bonn, Germany.
"Neuroethology of Sensory Systems"

7. Rui Oliveira, Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, Lisboa,
Portugal
"From hormones to behaviour and back: androgens, social context and
competition".

8. Hanna Kokko, University of Helsinki, Finland
"Love and hatred in a world of feedback"

9. Sara J. Shettleworth, University of Toronto, Canada
"How do animals know what they know?"

10. Marian Stamp Dawkins, Department of Zoology, University of
Oxford, England
"The scientific basis for assessing suffering in animals"

11. Robert L. Trivers, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers
University,USA
"Human Ethology / Genes in conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic
Elements"

Regards,
Jay R. Feierman

Did evolution make our eyes stand out?

Researchers test ‘cooperative eye’ hypothesis in humans and apes

By Ker Than
LiveScience
Updated: 7:57 p.m. ET Nov. 8, 2006

For humans, the eyes are more than just windows to the outside world. They are also portals inward, providing others with glimpses into our inner thoughts and feelings.

Of all primates, human eyes are the most conspicuous; our eyes see, but they are also meant to be seen. Our colored irises float against backdrops of white and encircle black pupils. This color contrast is not found in the eyes of most apes.

According to one idea, called the cooperative eye hypothesis, the distinctive features that help highlight our eyes evolved partly to help us follow each others' gazes when communicating or when cooperating with one another on tasks requiring close contact.

In a new study that is one of the first direct tests of this theory, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany looked at what effect head and eye movements had on redirecting the gaze of great apes versus human infants.

In the study, a human experimenter did one of the following:

Closed his eyes, but tilted his head up toward the ceiling

Kept head stationary while looking at the ceiling

Looked at the ceiling with both head and eyes

Kept head stationary while looking straight ahead

Results showed that the great apes — which included 11 chimpanzees, four gorillas and four bonobos — were more likely to follow the experimenter's gaze when he moved only his head. In contrast, the 40 human infants looked up more often when the experimenter moved only his eyes.

The findings suggest that great apes are influenced more by head than eyes when trying to follow another's gaze, while humans are more reliant on eyes under the same circumstances.

The study, led by Michael Tomasello, will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Human Evolution.

The small things
Kevin Haley, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience he thinks the cooperative eye hypothesis is quite plausible, especially "in light of research demonstrating that human infants and children both infer cooperative intentions in others and display cooperative intensions themselves."

Comparisons of human eyes to those of other primates reveal several subtle differences that help make ours stand out. For example, the human eye lacks certain pigments found in primate eyes, so the outer fibrous covering, or "sclera," of our eyeball is white. In contrast, most primates have uniformly brown or dark-hued sclera, making it more difficult to determine the direction they're looking from their eyes alone.

Another subtle aid that helps us determine where another person is looking is the contrast in color between our facial skin, sclera and irises. Most apes have low contrast between their eyes and facial skin.

Humans are also the only primates for whom the outline of the eye and the position of the iris are clearly visible. In addition, our eyes are more horizontally elongated and disproportionately large for our body size compared to most apes. Gorillas, for example, have massive bodies but relatively small eyes.

The cooperative eye hypothesis explains these differences as traits that evolved to help facilitate communication and cooperation between members of a social group. As one important example, human mothers and infants are heavily reliant on eye contact during their interactions. One study found that human infants look at the face and eyes of their caregiver twice as long on average compared with other apes.

Clue to our humanity
Other ideas have also been proposed to explain why humans have such visible eyes. For example, white sclera might signal good health and therefore help signal to others our potential as a mate.

Or, as one other recent study suggested, visible eyes might be important for promoting cooperative and altruistic behavior in individuals that benefit the group. The study, conducted by Haley and Daniel Fessler, also at UCLA, found that people were more generous and donated more money if they felt they were being watched — even if the watchful eyes were just drawings resembling eyes on a computer screen.

Tomasello and his team note in their paper that "these hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, and highly visible eyes may serve all of these functions."

If correct, the cooperative eye hypothesis could provide a valuable clue about when we became the social beings that we are. “It would be especially useful to know when in evolution human's highly visible eyes originated, as this would suggest a possible date for the origins of uniquely human forms of cooperation and communication,” Tomasello and colleagues write.

© 2006 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15625720/

Lizards have personalities too, study shows

13:35 08 November 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Roxanne Khamsi

The lizards were monitored from birth (Image: Jean-François Le Galliard)

The researchers captured pregnant females for their study (Image: Jean-François Le Galliard)

They may be cold-blooded, but some lizards have warm personalities and like to socialise, a new study shows.

A behavioural study reveals that lizards have different social skills: some are naturally inclined to join large groups while others eschew company altogether. The discovery of reptilian personality types could help ecologists better understand and model animal population dynamics, say the researchers involved.

Scientists define "personality differences" as consistent behavioural differences between individuals across time and contexts. But there is a need for more research on these differences in wild animals, says Julien Cote of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. "Psychologists have explored the considerable range of non-human personalities like sociability, but mostly on domesticated animals," he says.

Scent of another

Cote and colleagues captured wild pregnant common lizards (Lacerta vivipara), and as soon as the offspring were born they were exposed to the scent of other lizards, to test their reactions. Over the next year the team monitored the newly born creatures to see how much time each spent in different areas of their enclosure.

Lizards that showed an aversion to other scents at an early age were more likely to flee highly populated areas of the enclosure, Cote's team found. These lizards were described as "asocial". In contrast, those that had been initially attracted to other scents often left sparsely populated areas of the enclosure to seek out areas of higher population density.

Understanding these personality differences in wild animals could give ecologists a more nuanced view of population dynamics, Cote says. "When studying and modelling how populations function, it is necessary to consider different kinds of individuals reacting differently to the environment rather than a unique behavioural response for all individuals."

Other experts agree that personality types could help explain why some animals might be more reluctant to leave a group and explore new turf. "If you have a personality by definition you are constrained," says ecologist Jason Jones of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, US.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2006.3734)

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Weblinks

• Proceedings of the Royal Society B
• http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/index.cfm?page=1087
• Pierre and Marie Curie University
• http://www.upmc.fr/FR/info/00

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Printed on Sat Nov 11 18:36:49 GMT 2006