Nonhuman primates, our closest biological relatives, play important roles in the livelihoods, cultures, and religions of many societies and offer unique insights into human evolution, biology, behavior, and the threat of emerging diseases. They are an essential component of tropical biodiversity, contributing to forest regeneration and ecosystem health. Current information shows the existence of 504 species in 79 genera distributed in the Neotropics, mainland Africa, Madagascar, and Asia. Alarmingly, ~60% of primate species are now threatened with extinction and ~75% have declining populations. This situation is the result of escalating anthropogenic pressures on primates and their habitats—mainly global and local market demands, leading to extensive habitat loss through the expansion of industrial agriculture, large-scale cattle ranching, logging, oil and gas drilling, mining, dam building, and the construction of new road networks in primate range regions. Other important drivers are increased bushmeat hunting and the illegal trade of primates as pets and primate body parts, along with emerging threats, such as climate change and anthroponotic diseases. Often, these pressures act in synergy, exacerbating primate population declines. Given that primate range regions overlap extensively with a large, and rapidly growing, human population characterized by high levels of poverty, global attention is needed immediately to reverse the looming risk of primate extinctions and to attend to local human needs in sustainable ways. Raising global scientific and public awareness of the plight of the world’s primates and the costs of their loss to ecosystem health and human society is imperative.

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Impending extinction crisis of the world's primates: why primates matter

Summary

Animal social networks are descriptions of social structure which, aside from their intrinsic interest for understanding sociality, can have significant bearing across many fields of biology.


Network analysis provides a flexible toolbox for testing a broad range of hypotheses, and for describing the social system of species or populations in a quantitative and comparable manner. However, it requires careful consideration of underlying assumptions, in particular differentiating real from observed networks and controlling for inherent biases that are common in social data.


We provide a practical guide for using this framework to analyse animal social systems and test hypotheses. First, we discuss key considerations when defining nodes and edges, and when designing methods for collecting data. We discuss different approaches for inferring social networks from these data and displaying them. We then provide an overview of methods for quantifying properties of nodes and networks, as well as for testing hypotheses concerning network structure and network processes. Finally, we provide information about assessing the power and accuracy of an observed network.


Alongside this manuscript, we provide appendices containing background information on common programming routines and worked examples of how to perform network analysis using the r programming language.


We conclude by discussing some of the major current challenges in social network analysis and interesting future directions. In particular, we highlight the under-exploited potential of experimental manipulations on social networks to address research questions.

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Constructing, conducting and interpreting animal social network analysis

The last decade's lemur research includes successes in discovering new living and extinct species and learning about the distribution, biogeography, physiology, behavior, and ecology of previously little-studied species. In addition, in both the dry forest and rain forest, long-term studies of lemur demography, life history, and reproduction, have been completed in conjunction with data on tree productivity, phenology, and climate. Lemurs contrast with anthropoids in several behavioral features, including female dominance, targeted female-female aggression, lack of sexual dimorphism regardless of mating system, sperm competition coupled with male-male aggression, high infant mortality, cathemerality, and strict seasonal breeding. Hypotheses to explain these traits include the "energy conservation hypothesis" (ECH) suggesting that harsh and unpredictable climate factors on the island of Madagascar have affected the evolution of female dominance, and the "evolutionary disequilibrium hypotheses" (EVDH) suggesting that the recent megafauna extinctions have influenced lemurs to become diurnal. These hypotheses are compared and contrasted in light of recent empirical data on climate, subfossils, and lemur behavior. New data on life histories of the rain forest lemurs at Ranomafana National Park give further support to the ECH. Birth seasons are synchronized within each species, but there is a 6-month distribution of births among species. Gestation and lactation lengths vary among sympatric lemurs, but all lemur species in the rain forest wean in synchrony at the season most likely to have abundant resources. Across-species weaning synchrony seen in Ranomafana corroborates data from the dry forest that late lactation and weaning is the life history event that is the primary focus of the annual schedule. Lemur adaptations may assure maximum offspring survival in this environment with an unpredictable food supply and heavy predation. In conclusion, a more comprehensive energy frugality hypothesis (EFH) is proposed, which postulates that the majority of lemur traits are either adaptations to conserve energy (e.g., low basal metabolic rate (BMR), torpor, sperm competition, small group size, seasonal breeding) or to maximize use of scarce resources (e.g., cathemerality, territoriality, female dominance, fibrous diet, weaning synchrony). Among primates, the isolated adaptive radiation of lemurs on Madagascar may have been uniquely characterized by selection toward efficiency to cope with the harsh and unpredictable island environment.

Lemur traits and Madagascar ecology: coping with an island environment.

Conformity to local behavioral norms reflects the pervading role of culture in human life. Laboratory experiments have begun to suggest a role for conformity in animal social learning, but evidence from the wild remains circumstantial. Here, we show experimentally that wild vervet monkeys will abandon personal foraging preferences in favor of group norms new to them. Groups first learned to avoid the bitter-tasting alternative of two foods. Presentations of these options untreated months later revealed that all new infants naive to the foods adopted maternal preferences. Males who migrated between groups where the alternative food was eaten switched to the new local norm. Such powerful effects of social learning represent a more potent force than hitherto recognized in shaping group differences among wild animals.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/340/6131/483.full.pdf

Potent Social Learning and Conformity Shape a Wild Primate’s Foraging Decisions

Approximately 26 billion animals, spanning over 10 000 species, are kept on farms and in zoos, conservation breeding centers, research laboratories and households. Captive animals are often healthier, longer-lived and more fecund than free-living conspecifics, but for some species the opposite is true. Captivity is a very long way from the ideal 'common garden' often assumed by evolutionary and ecological researchers using data for captive animals. The use of comparative methods to investigate the fundamental biological causes of these species differences would help to improve husbandry and enclosure design, and might even reveal relationships between susceptibilities to poor captive welfare and susceptibilities to anthropogenic threat in the wild. Studies of these species differences could also inspire and facilitate 'evo-mecho' research into the functions of behavioral control mechanisms.

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Species differences in responses to captivity: stress, welfare and the comparative method

The forest reserves of Berenty Estate were established by the de Heaulme family in consultation with local Tandroy clans, beginning in 1936 when the de Heaulmes founded a sisal plantation beside the Mandrare River (Jolly, 2004). Some 5000 ha of spiny forest were felled, but 1000 ha remain as original forest reserves. The reserves comprise several different parcels, including a spiny forest parcel called Rapily and two large areas of gallery forest, Bealoka (100 ha) and the main Berenty Reserve (200 ha). These two gallery forest reserves were natural “islands” of extremely rich habitat formed by ancient oxbow lakes or an entire river arm. The forests are dominated by Tamarindus indica, the tamarind tree (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). Berenty has the semiarid climate of Madagascar’s southern domain. Only along rivers with their high water tables can tamarind forest survive; elsewhere, there is the surreal succulent vegetation of Madagascar’s spiny forest. (Figure 3.3). Originally, the gallery forest was divided from the spiny forest by the steep banks of the old riverbed, easily traversed by lemurs, but with sharply different vegetation at top and bottom of the bank. Now the reserves are almost wholly isolated by sisal fields. The “islands” of gallery forest might seem too small to matter for conservation, but two overflights of the Mandrare Valley in 2004 showed that they are the only gallery forests remaining below the headwaters, except for two much smaller sacred forests near Ifotaka and a tract of tamarinds across the Mandrare River from Berenty that has little undergrowth and sparse canopy (Jolly, pers. obs.). Elsewhere there are isolated tamarind trees but no actual blocks of this forest type. Southern gallery forests are clearly one of the most threatened forest types of Madagascar (see Sussman et al., this volume).

Berenty Reserve: A Research Site in Southern Madagascar

Interest in social learning has been fueled by claims of culture in wild animals. These remain controversial because alternative explanations to social learning, such as asocial learning or ecological differences, remain difficult to refute. Compared with laboratory-based research, the study of social learning in natural contexts is in its infancy. Here, for the first time, we apply two new statistical methods, option-bias analysis and network-based diffusion analysis, to data from the wild, complemented by standard inferential statistics. Contrary to common thought regarding the cognitive abilities of prosimian primates, our evidence is consistent with social learning within subgroups in the ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), supporting the theory of directed social learning (Coussi-Korbel & Fragaszy, 1995). We also caution that, as the toolbox for capturing social learning in natural contexts grows, care is required in ensuring that the methods employed are appropriate-in particular, regarding social dynamics among study subjects. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://lb.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

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Evidence for social learning in wild lemurs (Lemur catta).

Plant Species Fed on by Lemur catta in Gallery Forests of the Southern Domain of Madagascar

Few Malagasy children and adults are aware of the rare and unique fauna and flora indigenous to their island-continent, including flagship lemur species. Even the Malagasy ancestral proverbs never mentioned lemurs, but these same proverbs talked about the now extinct hippopotamus. Madagascar's geography, history, and economic constraints contribute to severe biodiversity loss. Deforestation on Madagascar is reported to be over 100,000 ha/year, with only 10–15% of the island retaining natural forest [Green & Sussman, 1990]. Educating children, teacher-training, and community projects about environmental and conservation efforts to protect the remaining natural habitats of endangered lemur species provide a basis for long-term changes in attitudes and practices. Case studies of three conservation education projects located in different geographical regions of Madagascar, Centre ValBio, Madagacar Wildlife Conservation Alaotra Comic Book Project, and The Ako Book Project, are presented together with their ongoing stages of development, assessment, and outcomes. We argue that while nongovernmental organizational efforts are and will be very important, the Ministry of Education urgently needs to incorporate biodiversity education in the curriculum at all levels, from primary school to university. Am. J. Primatol. 72:391–406, 2010. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

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Hantanirina Rasamimanana

Papers

Berenty Reserve: A Research Site in Southern Madagascar

Evidence for social learning in wild lemurs (Lemur catta).

Plant Species Fed on by Lemur catta in Gallery Forests of the Southern Domain of Madagascar

Conservation education in Madagascar: three case studies in the biologically diverse island-continent.

Tamarind Recruitment and Long-Term Stability in the Gallery Forest at Berenty, Madagascar