Re-evaluating the relationship between female social bonds and infant survival in wild baboons.

Over the past few decades studies have provided strong evidence that the robust links between the social environment, health, and survival found in humans also extend to non-human social animals. A number of these studies emphasize the early life origins of these effects. For example, in several social mammals, more socially engaged mothers have infants with higher rates of survival compared to less socially engaged mothers, suggesting that positive maternal social relationships causally improve offspring survival.

Explaining the primate extinction crisis: predictors of extinction risk and active threats.

Explaining why some species are disproportionately impacted by the extinction crisis is of critical importance for conservation biology as a science and for proactively protecting species that are likely to become threatened in the future. Using the most current data on threat status, population trends, and threat types for 446 primate species, we advance previous research on the determinants of extinction risk by including a wider array of phenotypic traits as predictors, filling gaps in these trait data using multiple imputation, and investigating the mechanisms that connect organismal traits to extinction risk. Our Bayesian phylogenetically controlled analyses reveal that insular species exhibit higher threat status, while those that are more omnivorous and live in larger groups have lower threat status.