Total Eclipse of the Zoo: Animal Behavior during a Total Solar Eclipse.

The infrequency of a total solar eclipse renders the event novel to those animals that experience its effects and, consequently, may induce anomalous behavioral responses. However, historical information on the responses of animals to eclipses is scant and often conflicting. In this study, we qualitatively document the responses of 17 vertebrate taxa (including mammals, birds, and reptiles) to the 2017 total solar eclipse as it passed over Riverbanks Zoo and Garden in Columbia, South Carolina.

Brief communication: Maximum ingested bite size in captive western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla).

Objectives: Previously, we found that maximum ingested bite size (V ), the largest piece of food an animal can consume without biting it into smaller pieces first, isometrically scales relative to body size in strepsirrhines and with negative allometry in anthropoids. In the current study, we rectify the omission of great apes from the earlier sample to now characterize the V of the entire size-range of the order.

Materials And Methods: Five gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla-G.

Examining the extinction risk of specialized folivores: a comparative study of Colobine monkeys.

Species extinctions are nonrandom with some taxa appearing to possess traits that increase their extinction risk. In this study, eight predictors of extinction risk were used as independent variables to predict the IUCN category of a subfamily of specialized folivorous primates, the Colobinae. All data were transformed into phylogenetically independent contrasts and were analyzed using bivariate regressions, multiple regression, and a maximum likelihood approach using Akaike's Information Criterion to assess model performance.

Patterns of lateralized hand use in an arboreal primate, Simias concolor.

Studies of hand use in nonhuman primates suggest that several species exhibit hand preferences for a variety of tasks. The majority of studies, however, focus on the lateralized hand use of captive nonhuman primate populations. Although captive settings offer a more controlled environment for assessing hand preferences, studies of wild populations provide important insights into how handedness is affected by natural environmental conditions and thus potential insights into the evolution of handedness.