Amboseli Baboon Research Project

Last updated

The Amboseli Baboon Project [1] is a long-term, individual-based research project on yellow baboons (Papio cynocephalus) in the Amboseli basin of southern Kenya. Founded in 1971, it is one of the longest-running studies of a wild primate in the world. Research at the Amboseli Baboon Project centers on processes at the individual, group, and population levels, and in recent years has also included other aspects of baboon biology, such as genetics, hormones, nutrition, hybridization, parasitology, and relations with other species. The project is affiliated with the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, the Department of Biology and the Evolutionary Anthropology Department at Duke University, and the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame.

Contents

The Amboseli Baboon Project is based in the Amboseli National Park and southwestern parts of the Amboseli ecosystem, near Kilimanjaro. Its primary research camp is based on the southern border of Amboseli National Park, near the former Olgulului Public Campsite.

Background

The initial study of the project ran in 1963 - 1964, with a brief follow-up study in 1969. These laid the groundwork for the long-term, coordinated project which began in 1971. Since then, individually recognized baboons within the study groups have been followed on a near-daily basis.

The project was founded by Stuart Altmann and Jeanne Altmann (member of the United States National Academy of Sciences).

Present day

The project is currently co-directed by Jeanne Altmann and Susan Alberts, with Beth Archie and Jenny Tung serving as associate directors. The majority of the project's data are collected by three long-term field observers, Raphael Mututua, who is also the project manager in Kenya, Serah Sayialel, and Kinyua Warutere.

Its funding has come from a number of sources over the years, including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Chicago Zoological Society. The software developed by the project to manage the collected data, Babase, is produced with Open-source software and is itself Open-source software and available to the public. [2] Over the period of its existence The Amboseli Baboon Project has produced over 230 peer-reviewed articles, reports, and popular accounts.

Discoveries

Related Research Articles

Primate Order of mammals

A primate is a eutherian mammal constituting the taxonomic order Primates. Primates arose 85–55 million years ago first from small terrestrial mammals, which adapted to living in the trees of tropical forests: many primate characteristics represent adaptations to life in this challenging environment, including large brains, visual acuity, color vision, a shoulder girdle allowing a large degree of movement in the shoulder joint, and dextrous hands. Primates range in size from Madame Berthe's mouse lemur, which weighs 30 g (1 oz), to the eastern gorilla, weighing over 200 kg (440 lb). There are 376–522 species of living primates, depending on which classification is used. New primate species continue to be discovered: over 25 species were described in the 2000s, 36 in the 2010s, and three in the 2020s.

Robin Dunbar

Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist and a specialist in primate behaviour. He is currently head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships".

Dominance hierarchy Type of social hierarchy

In biology, a dominance hierarchy is a type of social hierarchy that arises when members of animal social groups interact, creating a ranking system. A dominant higher-ranking individual is sometimes called an alpha, and the submissive lower-ranking individual a beta. Different types of interactions can result in dominance depending on the species, including ritualized displays of aggression or direct physical violence. In social living groups, members are likely to compete for access to limited resources and mating opportunities. Rather than fighting each time they meet, relative rank is established between individuals of the same sex, with higher-ranking individuals often gaining more access to resources and mates. Based on repetitive interactions, a social order is created that is subject to change each time a dominant animal is challenged by a subordinate one.

Chacma baboon Species of baboon from the Old World monkey family

The chacma baboon, also known as the Cape baboon, is, like all other baboons, from the Old World monkey family. It is one of the largest of all monkeys. Located primarily in southern Africa, the chacma baboon has a wide variety of social behaviours, including a dominance hierarchy, collective foraging, adoption of young by females, and friendship pairings. These behaviors form parts of a complex evolutionary ecology. In general, the species is not threatened, but human population pressure has increased contact between humans and baboons. Hunting, trapping, and accidents kill or remove many baboons from the wild, thereby reducing baboon numbers and disrupting their social structure.

Social grooming Behavior in social animals

Social grooming is a behavior in which social animals, including humans, clean or maintain one another's body or appearance. A related term, allogrooming, indicates social grooming between members of the same species. Grooming is a major social activity, and a means by which animals who live in close proximity may bond and reinforce social structures, family links, and build companionships. Social grooming is also used as a means of conflict resolution, maternal behavior and reconciliation in some species. Mutual grooming typically describes the act of grooming between two individuals, often as a part of social grooming, pair bonding, or a precoital activity.

Monogamous pairing in animals refers to the natural history of mating systems in which species pair bond to raise offspring. This is associated, usually implicitly, with sexual monogamy.

Generic Model Organism Database

The Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD) project provides biological research communities with a toolkit of open-source software components for visualizing, annotating, managing, and storing biological data. The GMOD project is funded by the United States National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

Reproductive suppression

Reproductive suppression involves the prevention or inhibition of reproduction in otherwise healthy adult individuals. It includes delayed sexual maturation (puberty) or inhibition of sexual receptivity, facultatively increased interbirth interval through delayed or inhibited ovulation or spontaneous or induced abortion, abandonment of immature and dependent offspring, mate guarding, selective destruction and worker policing of eggs in some eusocial insects or cooperatively breeding birds, and infanticide, and infanticide in carnivores) of the offspring of subordinate females either by directly killing by dominant females or males in mammals or indirectly through the withholding of assistance with infant care in marmosets and some carnivores. The Reproductive Suppression Model argues that "females can optimize their lifetime reproductive success by suppressing reproduction when future [physical or social] conditions for the survival of offspring are likely to be greatly improved over present ones". When intragroup competition is high it may be beneficial to suppress the reproduction of others, and for subordinate females to suppress their own reproduction until a later time when social competition is reduced. This leads to reproductive skew within a social group, with some individuals having more offspring than others. The cost of reproductive suppression to the individual is lowest at the earliest stages of a reproductive event and reproductive suppression is often easiest to induce at the pre-ovulatory or earliest stages of pregnancy in mammals, and greatest after a birth. Therefore, neuroendocrine cues for assessing reproductive success should evolve to be reliable at early stages in the ovulatory cycle. Reproductive suppression occurs in its most extreme form in eusocial insects such as termites, hornets and bees and the mammalian naked mole rat which depend on a complex division of labor within the group for survival and in which specific genes, epigenetics and other factors are known to determine whether individuals will permanently be unable to breed or able to reach reproductive maturity under particular social conditions, and cooperatively breeding fish, birds and mammals in which a breeding pair depends on helpers whose reproduction is suppressed for the survival of their own offspring. In eusocial and cooperatively breeding animals most non-reproducing helpers engage in kin selection, enhancing their own inclusive fitness by ensuring the survival of offspring they are closely related to. Wolf packs suppress subordinate breeding.

Baboon Genus of mammals

Baboons are primates comprising the genus Papio, one of the 23 genera of Old World monkeys. There are six species of baboon: the hamadryas baboon, the Guinea baboon, the olive baboon, the yellow baboon, the Kinda baboon and the chacma baboon. Each species is native to one of six areas of Africa and the hamadryas baboon is also native to part of the Arabian Peninsula. Baboons are among the largest non-hominoid primates and have existed for at least two million years.

Female copulatory vocalizations, also called female copulation calls or coital vocalizations, are produced by female primates, including human females, and female non-primates. Copulatory vocalizations usually occur during copulation and are hence related to sexual activity. Vocalizations that occur before intercourse, for the purpose of attracting mates, are known as mating calls.

Sexual swelling Swelling of genital and perineal skin in some mammals as a sign of fertility

Sexual swellings are enlarged areas of genital and perineal skin occurring in some female primates that vary in size over the course of the menstrual cycle. Thought to be an honest signal of fertility, male primates are attracted to these swellings; preferring, and competing for, females with the largest swellings.

Monogamous pairing refers to a general relationship between an adult male and an adult female for the purpose of sexual reproduction. It is particularly common in birds, but there are examples of this occurrence in reptiles, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, and mammals.

In biology, paternal care is parental investment provided by a male to his own offspring. It is a complex social behaviour in vertebrates associated with animal mating systems, life history traits, and ecology. Paternal care may be provided in concert with the mother or, more rarely, by the male alone.

Jeanne Altmann is a professor emerita and Eugene Higgins Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology currently at Princeton University. She is known for her research on the social behaviour of baboons and her contributions to contemporary primate behavioural ecology. She is a founder and co-director of the Amboseli Baboon Research Project. Her paper in 1974 on the observational study of behaviour is a cornerstone for ecologists and has been cited more than 10,000 times. She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society (2020)

Susan C. Alberts is an American primatologist, anthropologist, and biologist who is the current Chair of the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University; previously, she served as a Bass fellow and the Robert F. Durden Professor of Biology at Duke. She currently co-directs the Amboseli Baboon Research Project with Jeanne Altmann of Princeton University. Her research broadly studies how animal behavior evolved in mammals, with a specific focus on the social behavior, demography, and genetics of the yellow baboon, although some of her work has included the African elephant. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014, won the Cozzarelli Prize of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016, and was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.

Endocrinology of parenting has been the subject of considerable study with focus both on human females and males and on females and males of other mammalian species. Parenting as an adaptive problem in mammals involves specific endocrine signals that were naturally selected to respond to infant cues and environmental inputs. Infants across species produce a number of cues to inform caregivers of their needs. These include visual cues, like facial characteristics, or in some species smiling, auditory cues, such as vocalizations, olfactory cues, and tactile stimulation. A commonly mentioned hormone in parenting is oxytocin, however many other hormones relay key information that results in variations in behavior. These include estrogen, progesterone, prolactin, cortisol, and testosterone. While hormones are not necessary for the expression of maternal behavior, they may influence it.

Extended female sexuality

Extended female sexuality is where the female of a species mates despite being infertile. In most species, the female only engages in copulation when she is fertile. However, extended sexuality has been documented in old world primates, pair bonded birds and some insects. Extended sexuality is most prominent in human females who exhibit no change in copulation rate across the ovarian cycle.

Infanticide in non-human primates occurs when an individual kills its own or another individual's dependent young. Five hypotheses have been proposed to explain infanticide in non-human primates: exploitation, resource competition, parental manipulation, sexual selection, and social pathology.

Dorothy Leavitt Cheney was an American scientist who studied the social behavior, communication, and cognition of wild primates in their natural habitat. She was Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of both the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Margaret Chatham Crofoot is an American anthropologist who is a professor at the University of Konstanz and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. Her research considers the behavior and decision making of primates. She was appointed an Alexander von Humboldt Professor in 2019.

References

  1. "Amboseli Baboon Research Project".
  2. "SourceCode". Babase Wiki. Retrieved 5 May 2015.
  3. Altmann, J.B.; Alberts, S.C.; Altmann, J (2003). "Social bonds of female baboons enhance infant survival". Science. 302 (5648): 1231–1234. Bibcode:2003Sci...302.1231S. doi:10.1126/science.1088580. PMID   14615543. S2CID   24970809.
  4. Charpentier, M; VanHorn, R.C.; Altmann, J.; Alberts, S.C. (2008). "Paternal effects on offspring fitness in a multi-male primate society". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 105 (6): 1988–1992. Bibcode:2008PNAS..105.1988C. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0711219105 . PMC   2538869 . PMID   18250308.
  5. Onyango, P.O.; Gesquiere, L.; Wango, E.O.; Alberts, S.C.; Altmann, J. (2008). "Persistence of maternal effects in baboons: mother's dominance rank at son's conception predicts stress hormone levels in sub-adult males". Hormones and Behavior. 54 (319–324): 319–324. doi:10.1016/j.yhbeh.2008.03.002. PMC   2586325 . PMID   18448106.
  6. Altmann, J.C.; Alberts, S.C.; Silk, J.B.; Altmann, J. (2003). "True paternal care in a multi-male primate society". Nature. 425 (6954): 179–181. Bibcode:2003Natur.425..179B. doi:10.1038/nature01866. PMID   12968180. S2CID   1348221.
  7. Gesquiere, L.R.; Learn, N.H.; Simao, C.M.; Onyango, P.O.; Alberts, S.C.; Altmann, J. (2011). "Life at the top: rank and stress in wild male baboons". Science. 333 (6040): 357–360. Bibcode:2011Sci...333..357G. doi:10.1126/science.1207120. PMC   3433837 . PMID   21764751.