Living Links Center Blog

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:41:00 +0000

A photograph recently published by National Geographic and making the rounds online is renewing discussion about whether other animals experience the very human emotions of loss or mourning.

Photo credit: Monica Szczupider

The photograph by Monica Szczupider at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon shows a group of chimpanzees (I counted 16) watching from behind a fence as Dorothy, one of their deceased members, is moved for burial. The composition of the photograph is remarkable. A large group of chimpanzees are gathered together in close quarters in a way that chimpanzees otherwise only do when sharing food or grooming. Each and every chimpanzee is focused on Dorothy, and you can even see chimpanzees in the back standing and craning to get a better look. A chimpanzee at the back left has his/her hand on another (physical contact is used for support in chimpanzees as well as people), a chimpanzee in the middle is leaning on someone in front, and on the right an older individual is holding her shoulders, basically giving herself a hug, which chimpanzees and humans use to comfort themselves. The serious, possibly even somber, expressions on the chimpanzees’ faces, combined with Ms. Szczupider’s description of how silent the chimpanzees were makes it very easy to translate this scenario into human terms. We, in this setting, would be grieving. Is it too much to suppose that the chimpanzees are doing the same?

The image immediately reminded me of a picture taken last year.

Photo credit: Marco Stepniak

A female gorilla named Gana at the Allwetter Zoo in Münster, Germany lost her 3-month-old infant to a severe infection. The gorilla carried the lifeless body for weeks before finally releasing it and allowing zookeepers to retrieve it. The photo is truly amazing. Gana peering at her lifeless son, we can only guess what she was thinking, but like many people faced with loss, she needed time to let go.

I am also reminded of a more personal experience. My family’s first dog was a wonderful golden retriever. When he died at age 11, we were all very upset, but within a week or two, we had another dog. None of us were ready to bond with a new pet, but we felt we had to, not for us, but for our other dog. Our 2-year-old German shepherd, a bundle of energy that challenged our ability to keep her stimulated, became sullen and lethargic after our golden retriever passed. She was depressed. So we decided, in her best interest, to adopt another dog. The adoption worked, and pretty quickly our shepherd returned to her normal self. With the help of two exuberant dogs, so did we.

The question is, how do we deal with animals seeming to experience some of the most profound of human emotions? Do we “anthropomorphize” and call this grief? Do we “anthropodeny” and call this something different, like withdrawal from the deprivation of contact with a socially significant other? Perhaps how we treat some other emotional responses will help clarify the problem. Scientists have no problem talking about stress in animals. The stress response, starting with perception in the brain and ending with the release of cortisol or a related hormone, is the same throughout mammals. Depression has a neurochemical signature that is similar for humans and other mammals. I’ve seen the same anti-depressants prescribed to people prescribed to primates and dogs for depression-like symptoms, and they’ve worked.

So what about grief? Essentially, grief is a stress response that leads to transient or chronic depression, based on the perceived loss of someone or something important. In this context, grief is a matter of perception. Do the chimpanzees and the gorilla in these photographs perceive the loss of these individuals? Are they affected emotionally? Looking at the faces in these photographs, I perceive nothing but grief.

-- Matthew Campbell

Additional examples of animals responding to death can be found in Good Natured.

Our Kinder, Gentler Ancestors

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:11:00 +0000

Originally printed in the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 3 2009.

Ardi casts doubt on the notion that we have an innate killer instinct

By FRANS DE WAAL

Are humans hard-wired to be ruthlessly competitive or supportive of one another?

The behavior of our ape relatives, known as peaceful vegetarians, once bolstered the view that our actions could not be traced to an impulse to dominate. But in the late 1970s, when chimpanzees were discovered to hunt monkeys and kill each other, they became the poster boys for our violent origins and aggressive instinct.

'Ardi' Fossil Altering Ideas on Human Evolution

The skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, an ancient fossil dubbed "Ardi," is radically changing our ideas about mankind's origins. Kent State University's C. Owen Lovejoy says Ardi shows our ancestors were more like us and less like chimps. WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz reports.

I use the term "boys" on purpose because the theory was all about males without much attention to the females of the species, who just tagged along evolutionarily. It was hard to escape the notion that we are essentially "killer apes" destined to wage war forever.

Doubts about this macho origin myth have been on the rise, however, culminating in the announcement this past week of the discovery of a fossil of a 4.4 million year old ancestor that may have been gentler than previously thought. Considered close to the last common ancestor of apes and humans, this ancestral type, named Ardipithecus ramidus (or "Ardi"), had a less protruding mouth equipped with considerably smaller, blunter canine teeth than the chimpanzee's impressive fangs. This ape's canines serve as deadly knives, capable of slashing open an enemy's face and skin, causing either a quick death through blood loss or a slow one through festering infections. Wild chimps have been observed to use this weaponry to lethal effect in territorial combat. But the aggressiveness of chimpanzees obviously loses some of its significance if our ancestors were built quite differently. What if chimps are outliers in an otherwise relatively peaceful lineage?

Consider our other close relatives: gorillas and bonobos. Gorillas are known as gentle giants with a close-knit family life: they rarely kill. Even more striking is the bonobo, which is just as genetically close to us as the chimp. No bonobo has ever been observed to eliminate its own kind, neither in the wild nor in captivity. This slightly built, elegant ape seems to enjoy love and peace to a degree that would put any Woodstock veteran to shame. Bonobos have sometimes been presented as a delightful yet irrelevant side branch of our family tree, but what if they are more representative of our primate background than the blustering chimpanzee?

The assumption that we are born killers has been challenged from an entirely different angle by paleontologists asserting that the evidence for warfare does not go back much further than the agricultural revolution, about 15,000 years ago. No evidence for large-scale conflict, such as mass graves with embedded weapons, have been found from before this time. Even the walls of Jericho—considered one of the first signs of warfare and famous for having come tumbling down in the Old Testament—may have served mainly as protection against mudflows. There are even suggestions that before this time, about 70,000 years ago, our lineage was at the edge of extinction, living in scattered small bands with a global population of just a couple of thousand. These are hardly the sort of conditions that promote continuous warfare.

The once-popular killer ape theory is crumbling under its own lack of evidence, with "Ardi" putting the last nail in its coffin. On the other side of the equation, the one concerning our prosocial tendencies, the move has been towards increasing evidence for humans as cooperative and empathic. Some of this evidence comes from the new field of behavioral economics with studies showing that people do not always adhere to the profit principle. We care about fairness and justice and sometimes let these concerns override the desire to make as much money as possible. All over the world, people have played the "ultimatum game," in which one party is asked to react to the division of benefits proposed by another. Even people who have never heard of the French enlightenment and its call for égalité refuse to play along if the split seems unfair. They may accept a split of 60 for the proposer and 40 for themselves, but not a 80 to 20 split. They thus forgo income that they could have taken, which is something no rational being should ever do. A small income trumps no income at all.

Similarly, if one gives two monkeys hugely different rewards for the same task, the one who gets the short end of the stick refuses to cooperate. We hold out a piece of cucumber, which normally entices any monkey to perform, but with its neighbor munching on grapes cucumber is simply not good enough anymore. They protest the situation, sometimes even flinging those measly cucumber slices away, showing that even monkeys compare what they get with what others are getting.

And then there is the evidence for helping behavior, such as the consolation of distressed group members, which primates do by means of embracing and kissing. Elephants give reassuring rumbles to distressed youngsters, dolphins lift sick individuals to the surface where they can breathe, and almost every dog owner has stories of concerned reactions by their pets. In Roseville, Calif., a black Labrador jumped in front of his friend, a six-year-old boy, who was being threatened by a rattle snake. The dog took so much venom that he required blood transfusions to be saved.

The empathy literature on animals is growing fast, and is no longer restricted to such anecdotes. There are now systematic studies, and even experiments that show that we are not the only caring species. At the same time, we are getting used to findings of remarkable human empathy, such as those by neuroscientists that reward centers in the brain light up when we give to charity (hence the saying that "doing good feels good") or that seeing another in pain activates the same brain areas as when we are in pain ourselves. Obviously, we are hard-wired to be in tune with the emotions of others, a capacity that evolution should never have favored if exploitation of others were all that mattered.

Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior in the psychology department at Emory University, is the author of "The Age of Empathy."

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:26:00 +0000

Dr. Amy Pollick, a graduate of the Living Links Center is featured in the documentary "On the Road with Homo sapiens." She discusses gestural communication in chimpanzees.

View the clip below.

-- Darby Proctor

Chimpanzees negotiate towards cooperation

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:50:00 +0000

Cooperation in animals is nothing new. Darwin mentioned it frequently. We know honeybees cooperate with kin to protect the colony, lions cooperate to take down a gazelle on the African savannah, chimpanzee males go on group border patrols in the African jungle, and humans often help move a disabled car off to the side of a busy highway. Cooperation, then, is quite common across the animal kingdom. New research, however, is beginning to show that, in its most complex forms, some animals may actually have more than just a simple understanding of how cooperation works.

In a study that dates back more than 70 years, chimpanzees learned to pull in a heavy box together to get the food that was placed on top of the box. More recent studies with capuchin monkeys that used a similar apparatus showed that capuchin monkeys will wait for the arrival of a partner before pulling, seemingly realizing that the drawer isn't going to move without a friend's help. A more recent study led by Japanese scientist Hirata used a novel task that required two chimpanzees to simultaneously pull two ends of the same rope to get food (see the picture below - a single rope is fed through a tube and two platforms, so that BOTH ends of the rope must be pulled together for the entire apparatus to move). Here too the chimpanzees learned to wait for a friend to arrive at the other end of the rope, pick it up, and pull before pulling the rope themselves. Clearly, these chimpanzees realized that they needed a partner to complete the task (i.e., obtain the food rewards).

A study by Melis, Hare and Tomasello looked even further into a chimpanzees' understanding of cooperation. Chimpanzees not only learned to coordinate their pulls to pull in a platform, but learned to PICK partners that were better pullers; in other words, chimpanzees chose to "play the cooperation game" with better collaborators (in these experiments, the chimps could pull a door pin to allow one of two chimpanzees into the room with them). In this cooperation task, chimpanzees demonstrated not only that they understood they needed a partner, but seemingly that some partners were better than others.

Now there is a new study by the same team in which two of the same type of rope-pull drawers were provided to two chimpanzees (the same chimpanzees from the previous studies who already understand how the task worked). Individuals compete for unequal resources, and sometimes need to negotiate over these resources so that both parties can successfully claim a reward. This study attempted to demonstrate how such negotiations lead to cooperation.

One drawer had equal amounts of food on both ends, while the other had unequal amounts (such that one plate was full of food, while the other had even less than the other drawer). Only ONE drawer could be chosen in each trial, and thus, the chimpanzees had to decide which drawer they would pull in together. Predictably, the first individual into the testing room, the dominant chimp, chose to sit in front of the biggest plate. But often, when the subordinate chimp entered the room, he refused to sit in front of the smallest food plate, instead opting to wait patiently in front of the "equal" drawer. Such behavior demonstrates that the chimpanzees seem to have realized that by simply agreeing to the dominant chimpanzee’s initial offer, the ultimate reward would be significantly less than if they “negotiated” for an equal reward.

In many of these tests, the chimps successfully pulled in the drawer. How? Well, although sometimes the dominant chimpanzee was quite stubborn and refused to give up his large reward, often, the dominant individual realized that unless he sat in front of the "equal" drawer and pulled with the other chimpanzee, he wouldn't get any reward at all. In this way, the chimpanzees learned to "negotiate" for cooperation. The only non-primate species to be tested in this type of cooperation task, rooks of the corvid family, succeeded in pulling in a drawer together but failed to wait for partners if released into the testing room individually. Are primates, then, the only group of animals able to understand cooperation on a more complex level? Only further research on a wide-range of species will provide an answer.

--Josh Plotnik

The Power of Mimicry

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:32:00 +0000

Mirror neurons, first discovered at the University of Parma in pigtail macaques, are seen as the key to a lot of interpersonal interactions ranging from imitation to empathy. These neurons erase the distinction between one’s own and somebody else’s behavior. Mirror neurons respond the same when a monkey itself is reaching for a peanut as when it sees another reach for a peanut. This is why they are also known as “monkey-see, monkey-do” neurons.

Their discovery has been hailed by Vilayanur Ramachandran: “I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.”

Everyone assumes that humans have the same mirror neurons (even though until recently the evidence for this was not overwhelming), which explains why we easily adopt someone else’s facial expressions (we smile when others smile, yawn when others yawn, etc.), and why we like it when others mimic our own movements. We like to walk in stride with others and emphasize synchrony, for example, when we dance. Studies have shown that if a man or woman goes on a date with someone who mimics their movements (leans on table when we do, picks up glass when we do), we rate the date as more attractive than one who is friendly but unsynchronized with us.

Bodily synchrony is very in common animals, because many animals live in herds, flocks, or groups where it is very important to move together and be highly coordinated. The same tendency is visible in human-animal interactions. See for example the picture of the dog and Chinese soldier – this kind of synchronization would be impossible if the dog had no way of mapping its own body onto another’s – or watch the remarkable video of synchronized movement between a woman and her dog, Tina Humphrey and Chandi.

Now there is finally a study of the same love of mimicry in monkeys, following the rule that the best ideas for animal studies often come from comparisons with human behavior (something about which I blogged recently). Annika Paukner and colleagues presented brown capuchin monkeys with experimenters who either acted exactly like the monkeys or showed no such mimicry. They then measured whom the monkeys preferred to interact with. The monkeys preferred the mimicking person, which means that a) they noticed when people copied their actions, and b) they preferred such people over others, just as had been shown earlier in human studies.

The power of mimicry in social relations is going to be a major theme in future animal studies. We are working on it here at Living Links, and so are other teams, and we can be sure that neuroscience will increasingly be part of the picture.

-- Frans de Waal

A lesson in formal logic

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:42:00 +0000

Recently, a paper published by Claudio Tennie, Josep Call and Michael Tomasello from the Leipzig Max Planck claimed to show that humans are unique because human culture “has the distinctive characteristic that it accumulates modifications over time.” They say that this is largely because, compared to the cultural learning of other animals, human cultural learning is “more oriented towards process than product.” This may very well be true. Unfortunately, there is no way to reach this conclusion based on the research described in their paper, despite what the authors would have you believe. This is because the authors rely on negative evidence as the foundation of their claim.

They compared apes to human children in their ability to learn a task (tying a loop from string in order to retrieve a reward) by watching a human model the behavior. The authors’ sketch drawing of the task is shown here:

The children were able to perform the task after watching the model; the apes were not. The authors then conclude that since no evidence had been produced to disprove their convictions, their initial claim must be correct: humans are uniquely oriented toward learning the process of solutions. In essence, the authors are making an argument of the form: the ability of apes to socially learn processes has not been proven true; therefore it is false. This is a logical fallacy, and excludes the possibility – very real in the case of negative evidence -- that the test wasn’t testing what it was supposed to. For example, the children are dealing with their own species and the apes are asked to imitate another species, so the set up is inherently biased against the apes. See another blog on this website on the issue of fair comparison. Previous experiments at Yerkes Field Station have shown that chimpanzees perform better at a social learning task when another chimpanzee, instead of a human, models the task.

Another example of the problems inherent in this (faulty) logic is illustrated by the creationist website answersingenesis, which currently features the Tennie paper in its News to Note blog as evidence that, not only are we distinct from other animal species in our mechanisms of social learning, but that the very theory of evolution is itself, false. After summarizing the paper, the site observes, “If man and ape are closely related, then one might expect more adeptness in apes’ problem-solving techniques… As creationists, we know that the anatomical similarities between man and ape are the result not of a common ancestor, but of a common Creator.” It appears that using scientific papers to create a God-of-the-gaps argument is a growing trend amongst the creationist community, as an article in Nature by Johan Bolhuis and Clive Wynne received a similar response (see a reply to creationists by the authors in SEED Magazine). I do not know the personal beliefs of Tennie or his co-authors, nor do I have any interest in discussing religious beliefs here, but I have to think that even the authors can see the problem –not to mention irony- in their own logic when it is being used by a religious fundamentalist group to educate against one of science’s most stalwart theories.

-Ian Longacre

New chimpanzee habitat

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:35:00 +0000

Last month, one of our colonies of chimps received a newly renovated play yard. The newest climbing structure was constructed with sturdy steel beams and consists of multi-level resting platforms, ropes, ladders, fire hose, swings, hammocks and uniquely designed nesting baskets. It reaches over 20 feet in height and stretches across most of the outdoor area. The chimps regularly climb to the top to scan their surroundings. Many thanks to our talented shop department for their innovative design and building techniques. The chimps seem quite appreciative!

-- J. Devyn Carter

Darwin’s Last Laugh

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:58:00 +0000

One of my strangest writing experiences was this essay for Nature (July 9, 2009). The opinions are mine, but the text and style are not. This is because first one editor went over it multiple times (communicating with me almost every day while I was in Italy), then another, then another, even after I had already signed off on the end product. These editors must believe that I am barely literate, so that my text needed all this work to make sense.

The essay reacts to an essay by Bolhuis and Wynne, who make fun of anyone so naive as to believe that animals have emotions, an inner life, and mental complexity. They’re convinced that animal behavior is purely based on stimulus-response conditioning, so why make a fuss about their accomplishments?

Several of my more provocative statements were removed (e.g. originally, I wrote that in relation to our closest relatives anthropomorphism is a “non-issue,” and that B&W had been “mocking” Darwin and anyone else who proposed continuity between humans and other animals, but both of these statements were considered too strong). So, what you have here is a watered down version of my essay.

The B&W essay uses the old trick of throwing bird examples at those who claim complex primate behavior. This has been going on since Skinner’s students “demonstrated” mirror self-recognition in pigeons. The argument was that if you can train a pigeon to peck at itself in front of a mirror, the chimpanzee who rubs a painted spot above its eye while looking into a mirror must be doing exactly the same. In other words, the chimp is not especially smart, because a pigeon can do the same. This is obviously untrue, because a chimp needs no training at all to react in this way to a mirror, whereas a pigeon does. No pigeon has ever been seen spontaneously adjusting its feathers in front of a mirror.

But this explains why B&W’s essay is full of bird examples: the goal is to bring down primate complexity. In contrast, my conclusion from Caledonian crows using tools or scrub jays planning ahead is that some birds just have astonishing intelligence. This is of course also the conclusion drawn by Nathan Emery and Nicola Clayton in their wonderful work. It doesn’t bring down the apes, but lifts up certain large-brained birds.

My essay just serves to put a few more nails in the coffin of Behaviorism, which ruled for nearly a century. It lumped all animals together since they all rely on the same simple learning process, and told us that “Pigeon, rat, monkey, which is which? It doesn’t matter” (BF Skinner). Most scientists, especially in neuroscience and evolutionary biology, have long since moved on. They are interested in adaptation and accept continuity, but we still have to occasionally deal with rearguard actions of the once dominant school of thought, which never fully accepted Darwin’s message.

-- Frans de Waal

The Primate Mind Workshop, Erice, Sicily June 3-7, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:18:00 +0000

Recently, Frans de Waal and Pier Francesco Ferrari hosted the Primate Mind Workshop in Erice, Sicily. This conference brought primate researchers from across the globe together to discuss how primate minds connect with other minds.

There were 18 main speakers as well as a select few student/young scientist talks and a poster session. You can go to the Primate Mind website to read all of the abstracts from the conference.

This event was a wonderful opportunity for students (such as myself) and young scientist to interact with some of the most influential people involved in primate work. Not only were the talks excellent, there was also time to talk individually with some of these preeminent scientists.

One unexpected outcome of the conference was the Erice declaration on the use of nonhuman primates for biomedical research. Christophe Boesch headed this statement in response to a recent article in Nature about a new technique of genetically modifying non-human primates for use in biomedical research.

The declaration has three main points regarding these genetically modified animals. First, that these animals should be kept in self-breeding colonies so that the endangered wild populations are not further threatened and that researchers using this technique should contribute to conservation efforts. Second, the animals in captivity must be given environmental enrichment to promote their psychological well-being. Finally, researchers should continue to use the methods of reduction, replacement and refinement to minimize the amount of animals used in this type of research. You can read a draft of the Erice declaration here.

In addition to the scientific portion of the conference, we also went as a group to several ancient ruin sites around the island of Sicily. The highlight for me was a visit to the amphitheater at Segesta.

We also explored the town of Erice. This is a very old city whose origins are lost to history. Today the city feels medieval with tiny cobblestone roads throughout and old stone buildings. It was a wonderful setting for a conference. You can learn more about Erice here.

Be sure to check out some of the photos from the conference at the Primate Mind website.

Percontations: Humanity’s Primate Heritage

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Sun, 17 May 2009 17:51:00 +0000

Frans de Waal and Jeffery Schloss engage in a diavlog. Watch below or at bloggingheads.tv where the video was originally posted.

Apes as "pets" - again

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:19:00 +0000

I am putting "pets" between quotation marks, because in many cases apes in the household end up in a miserable cage in the basement, because they are in fact not suitable as pets. And not only apes end up in such situations, but also much smaller monkeys, which have little hesitation to bite their owners or visitors.

I was surprised that anyone would keep an adult male chimpanzee, which is really not suitable as a pet. No primate is suitable, even small monkeys are usually detoothed or else locked up in a cage, and chimpanzees are notoriously into power, so will always try to improve their position. They may not do so with their owner, who has raised them, but everyone else is fair game. Read for example the book on Nim Chimsky, and you will see a lot of efforts to control him, and the way he imposes himself, and this is just a young chimp. So, I was not surprised at all at the recent incident in Connecticut. The brutality of it indicates that this adult male chimpanzee, Travis, saw the woman as enemy or rival. This was not the sort of well-controlled punitive action that a male will undertake to make clear what he wants: this was an assault, similar to the way chimps in the field attack outsiders.

Since the tragic case of Travis, who literally removed the face of a woman visitor to his owner's home, there have been many articles in the press, including the following from Jane Goodall in the Los Angeles Times (Feb 25, 2009):

Loving chimps to death

Last week in Stamford, Conn., a chimpanzee named Travis was shot and killed after he mauled a friend of his owner. The chimpanzee lived with a widow, eating lobster and ice cream at the table, wearing human clothes and entertaining himself with a computer and television.

The entertainment industry and pet owners rarely, if ever, provide for the long-term care of chimpanzees. Zoos don't want them because they have not learned to interact with others of their kind. So most of these poor creatures spend the rest of their lives -- as much as 50 years or more -- in small cages in circuses, roadside attractions and, yes, even in the homes of individuals who lack the means to provide for them.

Meanwhile, more infant chimpanzees are bred to maintain the supply for the entertainment industry.

The use of chimpanzees in entertainment and advertising not only condemns chimpanzees to lives they were not meant to live, it makes it hard for people to believe that these apes are actually endangered in the wild. But they are.

I myself spoke about this issue in a Scientific American interview as well as in my blog on Huffington Post (see also the 187 commentaries!).

But now there is better news. ChimpHaven (near Shreveport, Louisiana) is a sanctuary for lab chimps, but has also taken in some "emergency" chimpanzees. CH has now set up a rescue fund to take care of those. The first rescue chimpanzee CH has taken in is Henry (pictured on the left), who spent 15 years of his life in a dirty cage. Last November, Henry was found emaciated and vomiting blood, living in the garage of a private home. There are hundreds of such sad cases in the nation, and if CH receives enough support it will be able to help other abandoned or mistreated chimps. See the ChimpHaven website to read more about Henry and his improved situation.

These rescue efforts combine with the law change that tightens the pet trade, making the private ownership of primates a lot more difficult. Perhaps we will finally see a serious effort to stop people from keeping primates as pets.

Why do people keep primates as pets, anyway?

They want something different from others, and they think that primates are cute. They have been misled by the entertainment industry which still thinks that showing apes in sitcoms or movies is a way to draw attention and get cheap laughs. No one seems to realize that those “funny” primates in the shows have handlers with them with cattle prods or other ways of punishing their charges and that the grimaces of these apes are more often of fear than that they signify pleasure. There is nothing funny about their performances for anyone who knows apes. Apart from conveying the wrong idea that these are nice, playful animals, there is also the fact that they misrepresent them as caricatures of us, so never in the best possible light.

Let's hope that this insanity will end one day.

-- Frans de Waal

Orangutan economics

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:13:00 +0000

With the recent world-wide recession, economics are on the minds of many people. But the underlying cognitive skills for basic economics can also be demonstrated in apes, such as orangutans. It appears that humans are not the only ones that are concerned with the market.

A recent study by Valerie Dufour and colleagues (click here for the original article) demonstrated that two orangutans could successfully trade meaningful tokens with each other for food rewards. The two orangutans each had access to tokens which were useless to themselves, but meaningful to their partner as well as tokens that were worthless to both of them. The orangutans would trade with each other for the tokens that were meaningful to the other, but leave the neutral tokens alone. Towards the end of the study, these trades became equitable. In other words, both orangutans received the same number of tokens that they traded; they were engaging in a basic form of calculated reciprocity. If you give me one token, I will give you one token.

This principle of giving another individual something (i.e. money) in exchange for something that is more useful to you (i.e. a hamburger) is what forms the basis of economics. In today’s world, humans have taken that principle and made it much more complicated by incorporating other concepts such as the stock market and compound interest. However, exchanging valuable items between individuals is the central idea behind all of our complex economics. And now, we have evidence that another species also has this cognitive capability.

However, more research needs to be done in this area as these results were found with a very small sample of orangutans (two). Additionally, it is still unclear if the orangutans understood the task well enough to exchange tokens in a tit-for-tat manner. While the orangutans exchanged equitably, it was not clear that if their partner defected by giving a meaningless token, that the first would also respond immediately with a meaningless token in a tit-for-tat manner. Still, this is the first study to demonstrate some evidence for immediate calculated reciprocity.

Going forward, it will be interesting to see how scientists reinterpret other forms of reciprocity. Vampire bats, for example, will share blood with others in their group that were not as successful feeding on a given night. It is somewhat expected, that the individual that was shared with will share in the future. If an individual cheats, or takes blood but does not give any in return, then others will cease sharing. This type of sharing has previously been called reciprocal altruism. One individual gives without an immediate payback, but some type of payback is expected in the future. If there is no payback, then the cheater is punished by not being shared with in the future. While there is not an immediate exchange between vampire bats, it seems that they are calculating, on some level, which of their group mates ‘pay them back’ for sharing. With the new experimental evidence from the orangutans suggesting that immediate calculated reciprocity is cognitively possible, researchers should now explore whether there is the cognitive ability to calculate reciprocity with a delay. Perhaps, vampire bats are engaging in calculated reciprocity, but over time.

Regardless of the labels we apply to economic behaviors in other species, it is clear that humans are not the only species that can engage in meaningful economic exchanges.

-- Darby Proctor

Dogs care about fair play

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:58:00 +0000

It’s no secret that humans are sensitive to unequal rewards. In today’s turbulent economic times people are more sensitive than ever. For example, in recent months there has been considerable public outcry over the governments continued multi-billion dollar bailouts for industry, while the average individual is still looking for some relief. It has been suggested that this sense of fairness is necessary for the evolution of cooperation. After all, if we didn’t respond negatively when we felt we were being cheated, the best strategy in life would be to cheat.

This type of aversion to inequity was long thought to be uniquely human until a few years ago researchers here at Living Links discovered similar reactions in capuchin monkeys. Since this time, inequity aversion has also been found in other nonhuman primates including chimpanzees and cotton-top tamarins.

Recently, Range and colleagues found that dogs also had sensitivity unfair situations. They gave the dogs a simple task, lifting their paws to “shake.” Each dog was paired with a familiar partner who completed the same task. When both dogs were rewarded, they completed the task successfully. However, when conditions were changed such that a one dog received a reward for completing the task but the other did not, the unrewarded dog stopped participating (as shown in the picture). If both dogs presented their paws but neither was rewarded, or there was only one dog present, they performed at a much higher rate. Thus, it was only when one dog saw another getting a reward for the same task in which they themselves were not rewarded, that they went on strike. This suggests that the dogs were sensitive to the unfair reward distribution.

So what do humans, apes, monkeys and dogs all have in common that would support the evolution of inequity aversion? All of the species (or their close relatives) are highly cooperative. While a cooperative society may lead to a sense of fairness, what is particularly interesting to me is that the species studied have different levels of sensitivity to inequality. For example, humans tend to respond negatively to all inequity, even when we receive more than our counterparts. In contrast, monkeys only go on strike when they receive a lower quality reward than their partners. This study demonstrated that dogs are sensitive only when their reward is completely absent; they would still work for a lower quality reward (when they were rewarded with a piece of bread but their partner got a piece of sausage). As more studies on this topic are conducted, it will be interesting to see if there is an evolutionary continuity to a sense of fairness.

See also what the press is saying:

NPR

National Geographic

For more information about current research with dogs, please visit:

The Clever Dog Lab: Universitat Wien

-Malini Suchak

Nervous Old Male

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:42:00 +0000

This is a copy of an entry originally made on the Huffington Post. Click here to see the original.
----

David Broder in the Washington Post of September 28, 2008, writes an opinion piece entitled "McCain as the Alpha Male."

Since the term "alpha male" comes out of primatology, and I have known many males who qualify, I feel like commenting on Broder's observation

"... an imbalance in the deference quotient between the younger man and the veteran senator -- an impression reinforced by Obama's frequent glances in McCain's direction and McCain's studied indifference to his rival."

Looking at the body language of the candidates, however, I did not come away with the same impression. A confident alpha male chimpanzee would never show studied indifference. I have seen such behavior only in males who were terrified of their challenger. Chimpanzees provoke higher-ups by making impressive displays in their vicinity, hooting loudly in their direction, and sometimes lobbing objects at them to see what happens. Will the other startle or will he return the challenge? It's a war of nerves.

A self-confident alpha male just approaches his challenger and sets him straight, either by attacking him or performing a spectacular display of his own. No avoidance of eye contact: he takes the bull by the horns.

It rather is the hesitant or fearful alpha male who avoids looking straight at the other, sidesteps him as if nothing happened, ducks when objects fly, and just hopes that the other will give up and go away. This may work, but also signals weakness. One day, the challenger will pick up courage and do something more drastic, such as hitting the old guy's back. If the latter still tries to ignore his challenger after this, he's toast.

I read the body language between McCain and Obama as that between a senior male being challenged by a remarkably confident junior one. The senior didn't know exactly what to do. He avoided eye contact and body orientation, probably realizing that a direct confrontation might not go his way.

If McCain was an alpha male, it was an incredibly insecure one.

In another primatological reflection, a year ago I wrote about Hillary Clinton as alpha female, stating that only post-reproductive females will likely be successful securing massive support, since they pose no sexual competition to other females. McCain's choice of a female running mate of reproductive age obviously violated this rule, and it doesn't surprise me that she now has more support among men than women. In fact, the logic of sexual competition would predict that the former support will erode the latter.

Seeing an older male paired with a much younger female sets off red flags in the heads of many women, so that for McCain and Palin to appear side-by-side may be problematic. This is another major drawback to his choice of running mate, since appearing together is a critical part of political communication. It show others who your coalition partners are. Male chimps who are united groom each other, walk together, display in synchrony, all of which tells everybody else "we stick together, don't mess with us." This is relatively easily done between males, and such bonding has indeed been on display between Obama and Biden, two differently aged males with mutually understanding smiles and back slaps. Following the debate, Biden was on TV to praise Obama's performance (not unlike the way chimps hoot along with their heroes from a distance to signal support), whereas Palin was nowhere in sight.

It may be hard for McCain to avoid the appearance of being a loner.

For a recent interview (8 September, 2008) about the comparisons between primate and human politics listen to CBC's "The Current" (scroll down to Part 3: Political Primatologist).

--Frans de Waal

On baboon radio-collaring

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:05:00 +0000

I spent January of 2008 studying the Cape Peninsula baboons as part of a spatial ecology project headed by Tali Hoffman of the Baboon Research Unit of the University of Cape Town. You can see my post about that experience here. Recently, BRU has been met with complaints regarding their use of radio-tracking collars. I would like to weight in on this discussion with my personal observations.

While I was in the Cape Peninsula I spent many hours with the Cape Point group, which includes Winnie, a female with one of the radio-collars in question. Upon seeing her for the first time I, of course, questioned whether the collar had any impact on her day-to-day life. After spending a month around Winnie, I saw no evidence that collar had any impact on her. I saw her engaging in all the typical baboon behaviors, including grooming and foraging. Interestingly, I never saw her touch or express any interest in or discomfort with the collar.

During my time in the Cape, I came to have a profound respect for the research that BRU is conducting and how that research helps the South African National Parks Service manage their natural resources, including these baboons. Radio-tracking collars help researchers understand more about the needs of these intriguing animals, which in turn enables the Park Service to better manage them. BRU and the Parks Service should be applauded for their work with the Cape baboons.

--Darby Proctor

Giving is self-rewarding for monkeys

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 02:50:00 +0000

A new paper by Frans de Waal and Kristi Leimgruber has just been published in PNAS. This paper shows evidence that capuchin monkeys enjoy sharing with other monkeys.

Here is the official press release from Yerkes:

"ATLANTA— Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have shown capuchin monkeys, just like humans, find giving to be a satisfying experience. This finding comes on the coattails of a recent imaging study in humans that documented activity in reward centers of the brain after humans gave to charity. Empathy in seeing the pleasure of another’s fortune is thought to be the impetus for sharing, a trait this study shows transcends primate species. The study is available online in the Early Edition of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Frans de Waal, PhD, director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes Research Center, and Kristi Leimgruber, research specialist, led a team of researchers who exchanged tokens for food with eight adult female capuchins. Each capuchin was paired with a relative, an unrelated familiar female from her own social group or a stranger (a female from a different group). The capuchins then were given the choice of two tokens: the selfish option, which rewarded that capuchin alone with an apple slice; or the prosocial option, which rewarded both capuchins with an apple slice. The monkeys predominantly selected the prosocial token when paired with a relative or familiar individual but not when paired with a stranger.

A capuchin in this experiment selects a token.

“The fact the capuchins predominantly selected the prosocial option must mean seeing another monkey receive food is satisfying or rewarding for them,” said de Waal. “We believe prosocial behavior is empathy based. Empathy increases in both humans and animals with social closeness, and in our study, closer partners made more prosocial choices. They seem to care for the welfare of those they know,” continued de Waal.

de Waal and his research team next will attempt to determine whether giving is self-rewarding to capuchins because they can eat together or if the monkeys simply like to see the other monkey enjoying food."

To see a video clip of the capuchins in this experiment sharing please click here.

You can also see what the press is saying by clicking a link below:

The Associated Press

Reuters

Science Daily

You can download a PDF of the article here.

Nothing Boring about Studying Yawns

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:28:00 +0000

When it comes to contagious yawning, it seems that every new study dramatically changes our understanding of the behavior. That is not too surprising given that until recently contagious yawning did not receive much attention. Contagious yawning was a curious, almost comical, human behavior with no relevance to the rest of our or any other lives. Several years ago the thinking began to change. First, contagious yawning was linked theoretically to contagious emotions (like fear), which forms the basis for empathy. With the link to empathy, all of a sudden there was a reason to study contagious yawning in humans and other animals. Empathy is one of our defining traits with implications for our evolution and applications to mental health and the functioning of society at large. Second, experiments supported the link between contagious yawning and empathy in humans, and comparative studies showed that humans are not the only species to yawn contagiously.

A chimpanzee yawn. Photo by: William Calvin

Last week saw two new species added to the list of species capable of contagious yawning. Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni and colleagues reported in Biology Letters that dogs yawn in response to a human yawning, and Alessia Leone and colleagues reported at the 22nd Congress of the International Primatological Society that gelada baboons yawn in response to other baboons yawning. For those keeping score, five species out of five examined show contagious yawning. The totals are, in order of discovery, humans, chimpanzees, stump-tail macaques, domestic dogs, and gelada baboons. The most interesting part is that no one has yet identified a species that has not shown contagious yawning when tested. How pervasive is this trait? We have yet to find out.

A gelada baboon yawn. Photo by: Michael Nichols

Ultimately, this comparative endeavor will be very useful in assessing empathic abilities in different species. If we can find a way to experimentally link contagious yawning with empathy in nonhumans, then we will have a behavior easily identifiable that will be directly comparable across species. The ability to compare species with a single measure would be immensely helpful in understanding the evolution of empathic abilities. These studies bring us a little bit closer to resolving centuries old debates on the uniqueness of human empathy, and that is nothing to yawn about.

-- Matthew Campbell

Frans de Waal and Richard Dawkins interview now available

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:46:00 +0000

Last November Richard Dawkins paid a visit to the Living Links Center to interview Frans de Waal for the TV special "On the Origin of Species." You can read our original post about that visit here.

Update (2/24/09): The video seems to have been removed from youtube. Thanks to the commenters that let me know.

You can see selected clips, but not the interview with Frans de Waal, here.

I also heard a rumor that you can download the series via the UK version of iTunes. It does not seem to be available in the US version. Please let me know if someone verifies this.

-- Darby Proctor

Oops! Bonobo picture by Frans de Waal graces the cover of TWO new books

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:27:00 +0000

In addition to being a scientist, Frans de Waal has come to be known by many people as a great photographer of the apes he studies. Frans has even released a book, My Family Album, of ape photographs that he has taken during that past 30 years.

Recently, Frans was contacted by a publishing company asking if one of his bonobo photographs could be used on the cover of a book. A few days later he received a similar e-mail. Assuming that these e-mails were from the same person Frans gave permission. However, Frans had just given permission to two separate books.

All Frans could say for himself was "I am not a photo agency, but a busy scientist, so I don't keep very careful track of this sort of requests, of which I get too many. And so yes, in my mind I must have thought I was dealing with a single book, and never realized I gave two permissions."

The two books, Erotomania and I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage, were published just days apart.

Fortunately for Frans, no one seems too upset about the cover snaffu, although it did get some press coverage.

Update: The media followed up on their original story with an explanation of how all this happened. Read more here.

-- Darby Proctor

The Influence of Japanese Primatology

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:12:00 +0000

Now that Japanese primatology exists 60 years, it is time for the rest of the primatological community to celebrate, because we owe so much to the pioneers from the East. This is not fully realized by the younger generation, and the older generation still remembers the disparaging remarks made about the way the Japanese scientists worked, which was considered fraught with anthropomorphism and blamed with a lack of rigorous quantification. One Western colleague even told me that as a student he was forbidden to read any of the Japanese papers.

In the meantime, however, Imanishi’s students set out to identify individuals (giving them names or numbers), following them over their lifetime (they knew their kinship relations), and speculating about culture in their animals. All of this is now, of course standard practice, and kinship structure and cultural transmisison have become mainstays of primatology. In the end Japanese primatology won by developing the approach that now everyone uses.

The linked article by Tetsuro Matsuzawa and Bill McGrew, just out in Current Biology, offers some interesting new insights in Imanishi.

Here a picture of a potato washing monkey at Koshima Island (photo: Frans de Waal).

Just to add one anecdote, described in my book The Ape and the Sushi Master (pp. 110-113, which includes a section on Imanishi), here is what happened when a Western “enemy” visited him:

Kinji Imanishi and the Rabid Englishman

“In my Western way, I came to Kyoto, the home of Imanishi and his School seeking the man and his ideas, but I came as an avowed opponent.”
Beverly Halstead, 1984

An eccentric Englishman, who couldn’t resist comparing himself to a Nineteenth Century explorer, landed on an Eastern shore, in 1984. As if possessed, he hammered away day and night on an old typewriter until he had a rather disorganized product in hand: a volume of over two hundred pages. Along with naïve comments on a society that he didn’t seem to like, the rambling text defended Darwin against the dominant Japanese scientist of the day, Kinji Imanishi. All of this was accomplished in a one-month period, thus defying the old saw that in order to write about Japan one needs to stay either three weeks or thirty years.

Beverly Halstead’s colonial attitude was complete: a heavy load of prejudice about the country he was visiting, absence of knowledge about his adversary (all of Imanishi’s important works are in Japanese, a language Halstead admitted not knowing), manipulation by the locals (the author had been invited by left-wing professors out to undermine Imanishi without getting their hands dirty), and earth-shaking cultural discoveries, such as that the Japanese are more individualistic than one might think.

As Westerner, it is impossible to read Halstead’s manuscript - dug up from a Kyoto library - without curling one’s toes in embarrassment, especially realizing that the text subsequently appeared in Japanese. The Englishman didn’t waste time on politeness. At one point, he managed to meet Imanishi in person, an opportunity he used to lecture the 82-year-old Emeritus Professor. After having handed the father of Japanese primatology a gift - a bottle of whisky - he confronted him with a carefully translated document with statements such as “Imanishi’s evolution theory is Japanese in its unreality” and “You see the wood, but the trees are not in focus.” No wonder, Halstead describes Imanishi’s facial expression on this occasion as one of profound regret at having agreed to the encounter.

What could possibly have compelled Halstead to be so rude? Why, upon return to his home land, did he write an article that trashed not only Imanishi’s views but an entire culture? How did Nature even dare to run it with a patronizing opening line such as: “The popularity of Kinji Imanishi’s writings in Japan gives an interesting insight into Japanese society”? If the whole affair provides any insight at all, it is in Halstead’s personality.

The late Beverly Halstead, from the University of Reading in Great Britain, was by training a geologist and paleontologist. Known for Communist sympathies in his early years, he later became a flag-bearer for Darwinism. Once described as “Darwin’s Terrier” (in a play on T. H. Huxley as “Darwin’s Bulldog”), Halstead had a professional life peppered with spectacular quarrels. An obituary in The Independent of May 3, 1991, highlights the nature of his combative attitude: “[He] was never the rebel but the supporter of traditional orthodoxy against what he saw as misplaced enthusiasm for the new.”

I guess, he was the kind of person who sought security in doctrine - any doctrine. We all know the kind: the former Marxist who turns devout Catholic, or the people who escape the grasp of a sect only to become born-again Christians. Halstead was definitely not Christian (“Darwin rendered the entire edifice of Christianity redundant,” he wrote), but clearly thirsted for dogma.

To him, Imanishi’s disagreement with Darwin was blasphemy. He came to set the old man straight, and with him an entire nation that, in his words, was engaged in a peculiar conspiracy to mislead everyone about themselves. The emphasis in Japan on social harmony is pure self-deception, Halstead concluded, because we all know that underneath there must exist incredible competition.

This was an interesting thought coming from a former Communist.

Halstead, L. B. (1984). Kinji Imanishi: The View from the Mountain Top. Unpublished English manuscript in the Kyoto University Library, later published in Japanese.

- Frans de Waal

Chimps Aren’t Chumps

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:03:00 +0000

Note: This is a reprint of a recent New York Times article. In light of our recent post, "The Perils of Primate Pets" we thought this article by Steve Ross was worth adding. You can see the original article here.

Chimps Aren’t Chumps
By STEVE ROSS
Published: July 21, 2008 - New York Times

Chicago

You see it on greeting cards and in countless TV programs and commercials: the exaggerated grin on the face of a young chimpanzee, often one that’s wearing sunglasses or a grass skirt. It’s about as common a ploy for laughs as a pie in the face. Generations have been amused by the antics of Bonzo, J. Fred Muggs, Zippy and, more recently, the business-suited chimps of Careerbuilder.com. A chimpanzee covering its eyes in embarrassment? What’s not to love?

But this picture, harmless as it might appear, is giving the public the mistaken and even dangerous impression that chimpanzees have a safe and comfortable existence — and nothing could be further from the truth.

A survey that I and several colleagues conducted in 2005 found that one in three visitors to the Lincoln Park Zoo assumed that chimpanzees are not endangered. Yet more than 90 percent of these same visitors understood that gorillas and orangutans face serious threats to their survival. And many of those who imagined chimpanzees to be safe reported that they based their thinking on the prevalence of chimps in advertisements, on television and in the movies.

In reality, chimpanzees face a severe threat in the wild: their numbers have dropped to about 20 percent of what they were a century ago, as their habitat in equatorial Africa is deforested and they are hunted as bushmeat. And once you know this, it can become more difficult to view chimpanzees as silly subhuman caricatures. Consider that chimpanzees share as much as 98 percent of our genetic makeup. They make and use tools, recognize and identify hundreds of individuals in their groups and learn from others skills like termite fishing. Of course, the reverse is also true: we are 98 percent chimpanzee. Would we condone putting funny clothes on human children so that we could laugh at the way they look like subhuman buffoons?

A progressive society should weigh the moral costs and benefits of practices like these. Misrepresentations of chimpanzees may not be as repugnant as racism, bigotry or sexism. But they can still serve as a benchmark for our society’s moral progress.

The good news is that a growing number of companies, including Honda, Puma and Subaru, have pledged to stop the use of primates in advertisements. The journal Science recently stopped its promotional campaign featuring chimpanzees in hats reading the magazine. That two consecutive Super Bowls have gone by without a major ad campaign featuring a chimpanzee is reason for optimism. Sometimes, success has to be measured in small increments.

Steve Ross is the supervisor of behavioral and cognitive research at the Lester Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at the Lincoln Park Zoo.

You can see the original article here.

The Perils of Primate Pets

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:49:00 +0000

Last week, ABC Primetime aired a segment about people keeping capuchin monkeys as pets, primarily as surrogate children. Though we make it clear on our website that Living Links in no way condones private ownership of primates, we would like to take a moment to reiterate this point.

For a summary of the ABC segment, click here.

First, primates are wild animals and will never be domesticated like cats and dogs. The process of domestication happens over many generations, not over the lifetime of one individual. A pet monkey will always be a wild animal, no matter how docile they appeared as an infant.

Second, while many monkeys are small and may appear “childlike,” they mature into adults in a few short years. Many people purchase monkeys as a sort of “child replacement” after their own children have left the house, assuming that the monkey will fill the space their children left, while being less responsibility than a human child. The rationale many give for purchasing a monkey instead of having a child is that 1) they do not have time for a human child or 2) they do not like that their own children grew up. Monkey children too require enormous amounts of time and grow up much faster than a human. Humans tend to carry their children with them for years. However, monkeys are often carried by their monkey mothers for about one year. After which they are able to move around on their own and are resistant to unwanted attention. In reviewing video clips of the ABC segment, the monkeys were often trying to pull away and biting at their human mother to escape. Being constantly held or contained is foreign to a wild monkey, even one that is raised in a human home.

A further complication in the monkey life span is that monkeys, particularly males, can become quite aggressive after reaching sexual maturity, something many owners have discovered after being attacked by their pet. This aggression is a natural behavior and a further reason why monkeys, and any other wild animal, do not make good pets. It is dangerous both to the monkey and the humans around them. Click here to see some rather graphic pictures of what can happen when pet monkeys are aggressive toward their owners.

In every species, one of the sexes leaves the social group in which they were born after reaching sexual maturity. It is no surprise then, when an adult male capuchin turns on its human family, as their natural instinct is to leave the group. And while they are smaller than a human, monkeys are much faster and capable of inflicting serious harm with their nails and teeth. Many monkey owners who have experienced the pain of this natural aggression have resorted to extreme measures to keep their monkey as a pet. They remove all of the monkey’s teeth and possibly even the nails. This is one of the most disturbing realities of private monkey ownership. It is ludicrous to claim that a monkey is a surrogate child while removing its teeth and nails. This would never be allowed in a human child, so why for a surrogate monkey child? While you may be protecting yourself, ask yourself why you need protecting. Biting is a very natural monkey behavior, something that they regularly do to others in their group, even their own mother, as a way to express disapproval or assert their dominance.

Third, people need to be aware of how monkeys are brought into the pet trade industry. If they are bred in the US, the mothers are darted (sedated) and the infant ripped off to be sold as a pet. We are well aware of the deep and long lasting psychological damage that is inflicted upon orphaned human children and the results are similar in non-human primates. One can only imagine what the result would be if not only removed from their mother, but from all contact with their own species. In order to develop normally, a monkey must have contact with members of their species and ideally their mother. Infants who are removed from their social group early often develop abnormal behaviors, such as rocking and may even inflict harm to themselves (self-injurious behavior).

A capuchin whose teeth have been removed by its owner.

The situation is even worse when monkeys are imported from countries where they are indigenous. Pet traders will go into a forest to get baby monkeys. The mother and any others who attempt to interfere, are often killed when removing a dependent infant. One of our graduate students, Colleen Gault, is currently in Costa Rica studying groups of white-faced capuchins. Over the past 4 years they have lost several mother-offspring pairs. While they have not directly witnessed the poaching of these individuals, no other adults have disappeared during that time, making the particular disappearance of females with dependent offspring quite suspect. For every infant that is brought into the pet trade, the mother and others in the group likely lost their lives in the process. In addition, not every infant survives, so for all that do make it to sale, several other individuals have died. For those studying monkeys in their natural environment, it is upsetting to spend years following individuals, putting together life histories, only to have their animals’ lives end at the hands of a poacher because someone thought it would be cute to have a baby monkey. And while it is illegal to import primates into the United States, the demand for them as pets continues to promote the capture of primates in the wild.

Lastly, there are not enough sanctuaries equipped to take in all of the privately owned monkeys that are eventually given up by their human family when they realize they can no longer care for them. Most of the sanctuaries that take in pet primates are at full capacity and have waiting lists. With the average lifespan of a monkey being 30 years, very few on the waiting list will ever get in. Who knows what the families will resort to if they are already at the point of surrendering their animal, but unable to find a place to retire them to. Often the animal is confined to a cage and given little attention, and is essentially abandoned, resulting in long-term psychological damage. Unfortunately, students interested in primate behavior are unable to study the primates at these sanctuaries because there is very little normal behavior exhibited by the monkeys after being raised in isolation from members of their own species. It is nearly impossible to rehabilitate these individuals to living with other monkeys after being deprived of appropriate social models. This also puts enormous strain on the people who work at these sanctuaries as they are not dealing with normal primates, but ones who are suffering from years of abuse and isolation.

While we primarily focused on monkeys, the pet trade industry is a serious problem for all primates, including the great apes, such as chimpanzees and gorillas. The trauma and suffering described above is true for all primate species, and the apes can live twice as long as monkeys, up to 60 years. At least 1 in 4 of the 625 species of primates are endangered and are on the verge of extinction. A list of the 25 most critically endangered primates can be found here: http://www.save-the-primates.org.au/fac ... s-list.htm
Unfortunately, many of the species listed are found in people’s homes and in the entertainment industry, having been purchased and imported illegally, causing irreversible damage to these dwindling populations. The bushmeat trade also contributes to the pet trade industry because many infants are left orphaned and then sold at local markets as pets.

Again, the members of the Living Links Center do not condone private ownership of primates and this list only touches on a few reasons why this is the case. Primates are indeed amazing creatures, but we should do everything we can to preserve them in the wild, and keep them out of private homes.

A capuchin in its natural habitat.

For more information on the pet trade industry and the bushmeat trade, please see:

The Problem with Pet Monkeys

The Perils of Keeping Monkeys as Pets - National Geographic

Fact and Fiction: Monkeys and Apes as Pets - The Humane Society

Bushmeat Crisis Task Force

Bushmeat - The Human Society

Inside the Exotic Animal Trade

Primate sanctuaries that rescue pet monkeys and victims of the bushmeat trade:

Ngamba Island

Primate Rescue Center

Jungle Friends

Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation

-The Living Links Center

Field Report: Capuchin Vulnerable Behavior

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:41:00 +0000

Through air dark and heavy in a dawn still battling to burn away the mists we head away from the group just waking and peeping hungrily after a night’s fast. This day my field assistant and I will document the life of Rumor, an adult female named most appropriately because she skirts the periphery of the group mostly unseen except when engaging in exceedingly unusual social behaviors. Each day a team of two researchers find the focal animal as early as possible and keep her in visual contact until dusk prohibits. During these 12 to 13 hours we alternate the tasks of ‘spotting’, narrating in detailed code the activities of the focal individual and the group, and ‘typing’, recording this code as data in a rugged handheld computer. In Lomas Barbudal, a biological reserve of tropical forest named for its wooded hills and established for the study of its bountiful vengeful stinging insects, this requires tremendous motivation, endurance, and considerable impetuosity as we often plunge down cliffs, through spiky vine tangles, muddy rivers, and into wasp nests with attention monopolized by a monkey traversing the canopy with ease. We also collect fecal samples from the focal throughout the day, which will be assayed for the stress hormone corticosterone.

Sometimes the best view of a monkey is from a rock in the middle of the river. (photo credits: Euan Bowditch)

We are studying the role that social support plays in handling stress, particularly the effects of physical social contact, which is far richer in capuchin society than our own. While in Western culture we might spend an entire day with friends or family and only make physical contact upon greeting or parting, touch is all-pervasive in capuchin interactions. Humans acknowledge the unique potency of physical contact in an interaction, but in part due to its power we relegate it to special situations. Some monkeys of our study population practice an extreme kind of physical contact the function of which is not yet known. Individuals place others’ fingers in their mouth, nostrils, even second knuckle deep into their eye socket. This interaction is often mutual, slow and tranquil. Though the participants are in a very vulnerable position and contact with such sensitive tissues is clearly irritating, as interruptions by sneezing and itching are frequent, they close their eyes and appear to relax throughout sessions that can last for an hour. But not just any monkeys will interact this way; specific dyads develop repertoires of vulnerable contact over an extended period, perhaps allowing them to build up something akin to trust. Following individuals throughout the daylight hours ensures that we will catch these sessions and also record the events that precede and follow them. Over the duration of this study we will be able to observe new dyads develop and perhaps dissolve and how their relationship changes within the group changes with this special bond. This behavior does not appear to be necessary to survive or innate; it has not been observed in all populations of the species, including some groups within Lomas Barbudal. Not all individuals in a group participate, sometimes despite encouragement from those that do, and if key individuals disappear the behavior does as well. Susan Perry, the founder of this research site, has shown that the practice of such behaviors can be traced through individuals. The pattern that emerges over 17 years of research at this site and comparison with others in Costa Rica is one of a social tradition.

Rumour and another adult female relax into the vulnerable contact of mutually sticking fingers into each others' nostrils. (photo credits: Susan Perry)

Rumor is a unique monkey. Most focals constantly challenge our ability to identify their comrades through dense foliage by foraging near others and spending their free time in social clumps; playing, grooming, fighting. Aside from a select few odd affiliations, Rumor rarely interacts, yet when she does, it is in the form of poking other’s digits in her eyes and placing her fingers in theirs nostrils. She is an innovator, always pushing these behaviors to another extreme. Years of observation and genetic data indicate that she is not related to any of her group mates, so creativity may arise from her independence from mothering and a lack of normal bonds with any daughters. Rumor has had female partners but she also practiced these behaviors with the alpha male, who had no other partners and seemed support her in conflicts. Upon his disappearance in June 2007, she became a frequent victim of within group aggression. Months ago a wound that has grown to half the size of her chest appeared and she now seems to lack the energy for anything but essential activities. Following her all day had become dismal business. But this day gave us hope for her and the perpetuation of the vulnerable contact traditions within her group. As she groomed Champingon, a big old male who tends to be peripheral to group drama, she brought his hand to her face and he permitted her to insert his index finger disturbingly far up her nostril. He did not reciprocate, but in the days that followed they had several sessions and he begin to take a more active role. Being back to her old ways bodes well for Rumor’s survival, although her wound still looks horrendous. We don’t yet know what function these behaviors serve, but having a friend who is invested enough in your relationship to let you stick their finger up your nose must certainly help one though rough times.

-- Colleen Gault

Elephants and People

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:33:00 +0000

I just returned from Thailand to check into the Living Links elephant project, headed by graduate student Joshua Plotnik, who will be staying there for at least one year.

It’s amazing how silent elephants can be if they want to. They walk up to you without you ever noticing, walking on velvet cushions, with a very flexible gait, and in fact much faster than you’d think. We always imagine elephants as stamping, sending vibrations through the ground, but I felt I had to watch my back standing among them at the Elephant Nature Park, near Chiang Mai, and later the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, near Lampang. The big difference with most observers of African elephants is that one is NOT in a Jeep: one stands there next to these mighty beasts and one senses right away how tiny and vulnerable the human race is.

Elephants are magnificent. But the elephant story in Thailand is also a sad story of changing habits and increasing neglect and abuse. This is why the above centers exist: to collect elephants abandoned by their owners or elephants in poor physical shape (such as land-mine victims), so as to provide them with appropriate retirement at a facility with excellent food and care. All elephants have a mahout who keeps them under control, which is the only way of caring for elephants short of releasing them. The latter may seem preferable, but in a populated nation such as Thailand, and given the danger elephants pose to people, “liberating” the elephants means almost certain death hence is not really an option.

I was thoroughly impressed by the commitment of those who care for them, who devote their lives to making sure the elephants can either live with others either under semi-free conditions or in a situation where they conduct shows and trainings, including music performances and demonstrations of how elephants were used in the logging industry.

At the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, I found it fascinating to see the degree of cooperation elephants are capable of. Our own research is of course not on trained behavior, or musical performance, but rather on spontaneous social skills, including coordination between individuals. The fact that elephants can be trained, however, to walk in perfect synchrony side-by-side, carrying a log between them while the mahouts on their heads are chatting and laughing and looking around (hence, certainly not directing every move), must mean that these animals are natural cooperators. Training is obviously part of the picture, but one cannot train any animal to be so coordinated. One can train dolphins to jump in synchrony because they do so in the wild, and one can teaches horses to run together at the same pace because wild horses do the same. For the same reason, one can train two elephants to pick up a log together and carry it to another place, walking in perfect synchrony, and lowering the log slowly together to set it down at the very same second on a pile, because elephants must be extremely coordinated in the wild.

I will leave it to Josh to report on the social behavior observed in these animals, but I came away with a deep admiration for them as their intelligence and sociality seemed on a par with those of the primates.

At the Elephant Nature Park, the animals are semi-free. They are always accompanied by mahouts, but relatively free to explore the environment and interact with other elephants.

--Frans de Waal

A Visit with Alan Alda

noreply@blogger.com (The Living Links Center) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:56:00 +0000

The Living Links Center was abuzz this week regarding the arrival of Alan Alda, the well-known actor from the 1970’s television comedy, “M.A.S.H.”

Alda made a return visit to the Living Links Center to discuss primate behavior and cognition as part of the upcoming PBS series entitled “The Human Spark,” which he will be hosting.

Along with producer Graham Chedd, our research team had the privilege of spending the day discussing our most recent findings regarding chimpanzees and capuchins from an evolutionary perspective. Alda’s genuinely curious nature and extensive travels were the groundwork for an enlightening exploration of our closest living relatives, and our understanding of human evolution.

For the purpose of this unique series, Alda has journeyed to various locations around the globe to document how primatologists are investigating empathy, culture, tool use and cooperation among chimpanzees. The Living Links team had the opportunity to sit down with Mr. Alda and discuss our research in detail, focusing on the connections between humans, apes and monkeys. From the tower overlooking one of the large outdoor chimpanzee enclosures, Dr de Waal explained various food-sharing behaviors as the chimps enjoyed coconuts, watermelons and sugarcane. Alda’s crew also filmed some of the social learning experiments that have been conducted with chimpanzees by our team over the past couple of years. As the filming took place, chimps eagerly participated in different cognitive and tool-use tasks in order to retrieve food rewards. For Alda, witnessing the complexity of the negotiations and the distribution of prized food items as well as the problem-solving abilities amongst the chimpanzees seemed to authenticate some of the key elements of “The Human Spark.”

Overall, Alan Alda and the PBS crew provided our research team with an exciting opportunity to explain our evolutionary similarities and differences with non-human primates. The series is currently planned to air in 2009 and we are grateful to have participated.

Just before we sat down for lunch with Mr. Alda, we had a chance to grab a quick photo. From left to right: Darby Proctor, Victoria Horner, Matthew Campbell, Frans de Waal, Alan Alda and Devyn Carter.

-- J. Devyn Carter