Fifty+ years of primate research illustrates complex drivers of abundance and increasing primate numbers.

Many primate populations are threatened by human actions and a central tool used for their protection is establishing protected areas. However, even if populations in such areas are protected from hunting and deforestation, they still may be threatened by factors such as climate change and its cascading impacts on habitat quality and disease dynamics. Here we provide a long-term and geographically wide-spread population assessment of the five common diurnal primates of Kibale National Park, Uganda.

Vertebrate environmental DNA from leaf swabs.

Terrestrial vertebrates are threatened by anthropogenic activities around the world. The rapid biodiversity loss that ensues is most intense in the tropics and affects ecosystem functions, such as seed dispersal, or may facilitate pathogen transmission. Monitoring vertebrate distributions is essential for understanding changes in biodiversity and ecosystems and also for adaptive management strategies.

The Movement of Pathogen Carrying Flies at the Human-Wildlife Interface.

Flies form high-density associations with human settlements and groups of nonhuman primates and are implicated in transmitting pathogens. We investigate the movement of nonhuman primate-associated flies across landscapes surrounding Kibale National Park, Uganda, using a mark-recapture experiment. Flies were marked in nine nonhuman primate groups at the forest edge ([Formula: see text] = 929 flies per group), and we then attempted to recapture them in more anthropized areas (50 m, 200 m and 500 m from where marked; 2-21 days after marking).

MASTREE+: Time-series of plant reproductive effort from six continents.

Significant gaps remain in understanding the response of plant reproduction to environmental change. This is partly because measuring reproduction in long-lived plants requires direct observation over many years and such datasets have rarely been made publicly available. Here we introduce MASTREE+, a data set that collates reproductive time-series data from across the globe and makes these data freely available to the community.

Costs of male infanticide for female capuchins: When does an adaptive male reproductive strategy become costly for females and detrimental to population viability?

Objectives: Infanticide in white-faced capuchins (Cebus capucinus imitator) typically occurs in association with alpha male replacements (AMRs). Although infanticide is likely adaptive for males, it imposes costs on females that are difficult to quantify without long-term demographic data. Here we investigate effects of AMRs and infanticide on female reproductive success and how these costs affect capuchin groups.

Fruit availability has a complex relationship with fission-fusion dynamics in spider monkeys.

Understanding the ecological and social factors that influence group size is a major focus of primate behavioural ecology. Studies of species with fission-fusion social organizations have offered an insightful tool for understanding ecological drivers of group size as associations change over short temporal and spatial scales. Here we investigated how the fission-fusion dynamics of spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) at Runaway Creek, Belize were affected by fruit availability.

Differential impact of severe drought on infant mortality in two sympatric neotropical primates.

Extreme climate events can have important consequences for the dynamics of natural populations, and severe droughts are predicted to become more common and intense due to climate change. We analysed infant mortality in relation to drought in two primate species (white-faced capuchins, and Geoffroy's spider monkeys, ) in a tropical dry forest in northwestern Costa Rica. Our survival analyses combine several rare and valuable long-term datasets, including long-term primate life-history, landscape-scale fruit abundance, food-tree mortality, and climate conditions.

Primates Can Be a Rallying Symbol to Promote Tropical Forest Restoration.

With 60% of all primate species now threatened with extinction and many species only persisting in small populations in forest fragments, conservation action is urgently needed. But what type of action? Here we argue that restoration of primate habitat will be an essential component of strategies aimed at conserving primates and preventing the extinctions that may occur before the end of the century and propose that primates can act as flagship species for restoration efforts. To do this we gathered a team of academics from around the world with experience in restoration so that we could provide examples of why primate restoration ecology is needed, outline how primates can act as flagship species for restoration efforts of tropical forest, review what little is known about how primate populations respond to restoration efforts, and make specific recommendations of the next steps needed to make restoration of primate populations successful.

Non-invasive estimation of the costs of feeding competition in a neotropical primate.

A key goal in behavioral ecology is to investigate the factors influencing the access to food resources and energetic condition of females, which are strong predictors of their reproductive success. We aimed to investigate how ecological factors, social factors, and reproductive state are associated with energetic condition in a wild neotropical primate using non-invasive measures. We first assessed and compared urinary C-peptide levels (uCP), the presence of urinary ketones (uKet), and behaviorally assessed energy balance (bEB) in female white-faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus imitator) living in Santa Rosa, Costa Rica.

Group versus population level demographics: An analysis of comparability using long term data on wild white-faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus capucinus imitator).

Primates have long been used as indicator species for assessing overall ecosystem health. However, area-wide census methods are time consuming, costly, and not always feasible under many field conditions. Therefore, it is important to establish whether monitoring a subset of a population accurately reflects demographic changes occurring in the population at large.

Female sociality and sexual conflict shape offspring survival in a Neotropical primate.

Most mammals live in social groups in which members form differentiated social relationships. Individuals may vary in their degree of sociality, and this variation can be associated with differential fitness. In some species, for example, female sociality has a positive effect on infant survival.

Charting the neglected West: The social system of Guinea baboons.

Objectives: Primate social systems are remarkably diverse, and thus play a central role in understanding social evolution, including the biological origin of human societies. Although baboons have been prominently featured in this context, historically little was known about the westernmost member of the genus, the Guinea baboon (Papio papio).

Material And Methods: Here, we summarize the findings from the first years of observations at the field site CRP Simenti in the Niokolo Koba National Park in Senegal.

Insights into the genetic foundation of aggression in Papio and the evolution of two length-polymorphisms in the promoter regions of serotonin-related genes (5-HTTLPR and MAOALPR) in Papionini.

Background: Aggressive behaviors are an integral part of competitive interactions. There is considerable variation in aggressiveness among individuals both within and among species. Aggressiveness is a quantitative trait that is highly heritable.

Social behavior and patterns of testosterone and glucocorticoid levels differ between male chacma and Guinea baboons.

In multi-male, multi-female groups of mammals, males usually compete aggressively over access to females. However, species vary in the intensity of male contest competition, which has been linked to differences in testosterone and glucocorticoid profiles. Chacma (Papio ursinus) and Guinea (P.

Male tolerance and male-male bonds in a multilevel primate society.

Male relationships in most species of mammals generally are characterized by intense intrasexual competition, with little bonding among unrelated individuals. In contrast, human societies are characterized by high levels of cooperation and strong bonds among both related and unrelated males. The emergence of cooperative male-male relationships has been linked to the multilevel structure of traditional human societies.

How the cerebral serotonin homeostasis predicts environmental changes: a model to explain seasonal changes of brain 5-HTT as intermediate phenotype of the 5-HTTLPR.

Molecular imaging studies with positron emission tomography have revealed that the availability of serotonin transporter (5-HTT) in the human brain fluctuates over the course of the year. This effect is most pronounced in carriers of the short allele of the 5-HTT promoter region (5-HTTLPR), which has in several previous studies been linked to an increased risk to develop mood disorders. We argue that long-lasting fluctuations in the cerebral serotonin transmission, which is regulated via the 5-HTT, are responsible for mediating responses to environmental changes based on an assessment of the expected "safety" of the environment; this response is obtained in part through serotonergic modulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

Methodological Considerations in the Analysis of Fecal Glucocorticoid Metabolites in Tufted Capuchins ().

Analysis of fecal glucocorticoid (GC) metabolites has recently become the standard method to monitor adrenocortical activity in primates noninvasively. However, given variation in the production, metabolism, and excretion of GCs across species and even between sexes, there are no standard methods that are universally applicable. In particular, it is important to validate assays intended to measure GC production, test extraction and storage procedures, and consider the time course of GC metabolite excretion relative to the production and circulation of the native hormones.