New Scientist Live:
23 August 2016
By Colin Barras
It can be lonely at the top.
Snub-nosed monkeys live at a higher altitude than any other non-human primate –
but they are also among the rarest of all primates.
The latest genomic analyses may
help to explain exactly how they have adapted to life in the thin air found in
their habitat and perhaps inform their conservation.
Snub-nosed monkeys were once
fairly common across Asia, before climate and geological processes conspired
against them. Mountain-building activity in the area associated with the
formation of the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau created
physical barriers that isolated monkey populations from one
another.
The deterioration of
environmental conditions during the last ice age helped keep those populations
apart.
By about 300,000 years ago, the
monkeys had been isolated for so long that they had
split into five distinct species. Golden, black and gray
snub-nosed monkeys live in the mountainous forests of southern
China, the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey inhabits northern Vietnam and
the Myanmar snub-nosed monkey lives in Myanmar.
The black
snub-nosed monkey has the highest elevational range of any
non-human primate. It lives in a small corner of the Tibetan plateau at 3400 to
4600 metres above sea level.
Xuming Zhou and Ming Li at the
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, and their colleagues, have looked at snub-nosed
monkey DNA for clues to how the animals survive in these challenging
conditions. The researchers studied the whole genomes of 38 individuals from
four of the five snub-nosed monkey species.
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