Evolutionary history of baboons

Date:  January 31, 2019

Source:  Deutsches Primatenzentrum (DPZ)/German Primate Center

Life on earth is complex and diverse. In the course of evolution, more and more new species have emerged that are adapted to constantly changing environments. Using modern genetic analyses, researchers can now fully decipher the genetic information of organisms in order to better understand their evolutionary histories and adaptations. Under the leadership of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine, USA, an international team of researchers, including scientists from the German Primate Center (DPZ) -- Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, has reconstructed the phylogenetic tree of the six African baboon species. The genetic information of baboons also provided clear indications that genes were exchanged between the species, i.e. that the species hybridized. The work sheds new light on the fundamental biological processes that produce new species. Since the baboons evolved at about the same time and in the same habitats as humans, the results of the study also allow conclusions about the evolutionary history of early human species (Science Advances).

Baboons are Old World monkeys and the six species are widespread in sub-Saharan Africa. They are well studied for their morphology, behavior and ecology. So far, however, little has been known about their genetic adaptations and evolutionary history.

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Baboon sexes differ in how social status gets 'under the skin'

Status-health connection depends, in part, on what it takes to get ahead

Date:  December 17, 2018

Source:  Duke University

A growing body of evidence shows that those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are more likely to die prematurely than those at the top. The pattern isn't unique to humans: Across many social animals, the lower an individual's social status, the worse its health.

That's probably proof that these gaps aren't fully explained by risk factors commonly attributed to humans, such as smoking, drinking or access to medical care, says Jenny Tung, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University.

What's trickier to determine is what causes what: Does the stress of low status make you sick? Or is it the other way around: does being sickly make it harder to get ahead and stay there?

New research by Tung, Princeton University's Amanda Lea and colleagues suggests the answer depends, in part, on how the pecking order comes to be. The findings come from a study of 61 wild baboons in Kenya, where females 'inherit' their status, but males must fight their way to the top.

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Tracking collars uncover the secrets of baboons' raiding tactics

Date:  November 8, 2017

Source:  Swansea University

Summary:

New research shows how canny baboons in Cape Town use a sit-and-wait tactic before raiding people's homes in search of food.

Scientists from Swansea University are part of an international team who have revealed how canny baboons in Cape Town, South Africa, use a sit-and-wait tactic before raiding people's homes in search of food.

"Raiding baboons are a real challenge in the Cape Peninsula, South Africa. The baboons enter properties to raid in gardens and bins, but also enter homes and sometimes take food directly from people," said Professor Justin O'Riain, Director of the Institute for Communities and Wildlife in Africa at the University of Cape Town, and co-author on the study published by Scientific Reports.

In a previous study, the team showed that whilst Cape Town's baboon management strategy was keeping baboons away from the urban space, some males were still finding ways in. The team therefore built bespoke baboon tracking collars allowing them track the movements and activity levels of 10 males via GPS and accelerometer sensors.

Dr Gaëlle Fehlmann, lead author of the study, said: "People assume the baboons don't have enough food in their natural habitats and therefore have no choice but to forage in town. In fact, our research shows there is plenty of food in the natural environment where there is very little risk of the baboons being disturbed by anyone. In contrast, the chances of human-baboon conflicts in urban areas are high, but so are the food rewards, which are 10 times richer in terms of calories."

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The rules of baboons: Biologists study the principles underlying the collective movement of baboons

Date: May 30, 2017
Source: University of Konstanz

How do baboons succeed in coordinating the movements of their group? Biologists at the University of Konstanz study these organisms in the wild to find out which behavioural rules baboons use when interacting with others. Konstanz researchers have found out that the animals only need a few simple rules to coordinate their group movements, enabling them to organise themselves, and to make decisions, without splitting. In four recent research publications -- published in the journals Science, Scientific Reports, eLife and the Proceedings of the Royal Society B -- the Konstanz scientists paint a new picture of group dynamics among baboons with unprecedented detail by tracking how individuals make decisions within a group. Research partners were the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama as well as Princeton University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of Illinois at Chicago (all USA).

Baboons have long been studied because they have a highly complex social structure, forming groups from 20 to over 100 individuals. Such social structure suggested to early biologists that baboons must employ high levels of cognition to be able to coordinate their behaviour with so many group mates. For example, classical theories on group coordination among baboons suggested that the larger, grown-up individuals should stay at the periphery of the group to protect younger and weaker animals in the centre. However, to constantly keep up this positioning, each baboon would need to know, at all times, where the other members of the group are. Konstanz biologists have now demonstrated that this is not necessarily the case -- neither is there a need for it. "Actually, coordinating their movement with only a few neighbouring individuals can generally be enough for animals to keep their group together, and what we see in the baboons is consistent with this idea," explains biologist Dr. Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin. Mathematics can further explain how individuals maintain specific positions within the group (either close to the center, at the front, back, or at the periphery) as her colleague Dr. Damien Farine explains: "If a baboon tries to stay together with only a slightly larger number of neighbouring individuals, this baboon will automatically move closer to the centre of the group. By contrast, individuals that coordinate their positions with a smaller number of fellow group members will end up at the group's periphery."



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Wallflower center pack baboons find place

Baboons consider best access to both food and safety

Date: May 17, 2017

Source: University of California - Davis

Are you the kind of person who, at a party, tends to be surrounded by friends in the middle of the crowd, or do you prefer to find a quiet corner where you can sit and talk? Recent work by scientists at UC Davis shows that wild baboons behave similarly to humans -- with some animals consistently found in the vanguard of their troop while others crowd to the center or lag in the rear.

Using high-resolution GPS tracking, UC Davis Assistant Professor Margaret Crofoot and her team of researchers continuously monitored the movements of nearly an entire baboon troop in central Kenya to discover how interactions among group-mates influenced where in the troop individuals tended to be found.

"How animals position themselves within their social group can have life or death consequences," explained Crofoot, an anthropologist. "Individuals at the front of their group may get the first crack at any food their group encounters, but they are also more vulnerable to being picked off by predators."

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New tools to spy on raiding baboons in suburbs of Cape Town, South Africa

Date: March 24, 2017

Source: Swansea University

Scientists from Swansea University's College of Science are part of an international team attempting to better understand the human-baboon conflict in Cape Town, South Africa.

"Raiding baboons are a real challenge in the Cape Peninsula, South Africa," said Professor Justin O'Riain from the University of Cape Town, a co-author on the study published by the journal Animal Biotelemetry, who has been studying baboons in the region for over a decade.

"The baboons enter properties to raid in gardens and bins, but also enter homes and sometimes take food directly from people."

In a previous study, the team showed that whilst the management strategy was keeping baboons away from the urban space, some males were still finding ways in. The team therefore wanted to understand how the baboons were doing this.

"Raiding events are so fast, so intense, that we couldn't keep up following them by foot in urban areas with high walls and security fences. We had to find another method to document the very special techniques baboons were adopting when raiding," said Swansea University PhD researcher Gaëlle Fehlmann, lead author of the study who carried out the fieldwork in South Africa.

"Here at Swansea's Laboratory for Animal Movement we have been developing new technologies to study animal behaviours and use accelerometers to quantify how much an animal moves in the three dimensions," said Dr Mark Holton, co-author of the study.

Such methods have been used for more than a decade, but mainly on birds or sea mammals. The Swansea team designed and built bespoke collars for the baboons that would enable them to precisely track the baboons.

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Why baboon males resort to domestic violence

Scarcity drives some baboon males to attack and kill infants of their own kind 

 

Date: January 18, 2017

Source: Duke University

"Desperate times lead to desperate measures," so the saying goes, and a new study finds male baboons are no exception.

Some baboon males vying for a chance to father their own offspring expedite matters in a gruesome way -- they kill infants sired by other males and attack pregnant females, causing them to miscarry, researchers report.

The behavior reduces their waiting time to breed with pregnant and nursing females, who otherwise wouldn't become sexually available again for up to a year.

The perpetrators are more prone to commit domestic violence when forced to move into a group with few fertile females, said first author Matthew Zipple, a graduate student in professor Susan Albert's lab at Duke University.

Researchers studying a baboon population around Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya found that immigrant males were responsible for roughly 2 percent of infant deaths and 6 percent of miscarriages between 1978 and 2015. But when cycling females were few, the death rates more than tripled.

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Baboons produce vocalizations comparable to vowels

Date: January 12, 2017

Source: CNRS

Baboons produce vocalizations comparable to vowels. This is what has been demonstrated by an international team coordinated by researchers from the Gipsa-Lab (CNRS/Grenoble INP/Grenoble Alpes University), the Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology (CNRS/AMU), and the Laboratory of Anatomy at the University of Montpellier, using acoustic analyses of vocalizations coupled with an anatomical study of the tongue muscles and the modeling of the acoustic potential of the vocal tract in monkeys. Published in PLOS ONE on January 11, 2017, the data confirm that baboons are capable of producing at least five vocalizations with the properties of vowels, in spite of their high larynx, and that they are capable of combining them when they communicate with their partners. The vocalizations of baboons thus point to a system of speech among non-human primates.

Language is a distinctive characteristic of the human species. The question of its origins and how it evolved is one of the most intractable in all science. One of the dominant theories in this field associates the possibility of producing differentiated sounds, the basis of spoken communication, with the "descent of the larynx" observed over the course of the evolution of Homo sapiens. This theory argues that human speech requires a low larynx (in relation to the cervical vertebrae) and that a high larynx, as found in baboons (Papio papio), prevents the production of a system of vocalizations analogous to the vowel system that exists in all languages.

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