Showing posts with label monkeys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label monkeys. Show all posts

Friday, 15 May 2020

Research shows even animals benefit from social distance to prevent disease

MAY 11, 2020


Microorganisms living inside and on our body play a crucial role in both the maintenance of our health and the development of disease. Now researchers at UTSA have uncovered evidence about the importance of maintaining physical distance to minimize the spread of microbes among individuals.

The scientists observed monkeys in the wild to understand what role genetics, diet, social groupings and distance in a social network play when it comes to the microbes found inside an animal's gut.

"Social microbial transmission among monkeys can help inform us about how diseases spread. This has parallels to our current situation in which we are trying to understand how social distancing during the COVID 19 pandemic and future disease outbreaks may influence disease transmission," said Eva Wikberg, an assistant professor in UTSA's Department of Anthropology who studies the interaction between ecology, behavior and genetics in primates.

The gut microbiome refers to all the microorganisms inhabiting the digestive tract, starting with the stomach and ending with the colon. Over the past decade the microbiome has come under more scientific focus because it's believed that an unhealthy gut microbiome can lead to obesity, impaired immune function, weakened parasite resistance and even behavioral changes.

However, researching microbiomes is difficult because of the variation in microbial composition between individuals. One long-standing question is whether this variation is driven by genetic makeup, diets or social environments.

This research inquiry has been especially hard in wild populations because of the lack of detailed data necessary to tease apart the myriad factors that shape the microbiome.

Thursday, 20 February 2020

Neuroscientists discover 'engine of consciousness' hiding in monkeys' brains



You probably need this engine running to stay awake.

A team of researchers has found an "engine of consciousness" in the brain — a region where, in monkeys at least, even a little jump start will make them wake up from anesthesia.

Consciousness is a mystery. We don't know for certain why creatures are sometimes awake and sometimes asleep, or which mechanisms in the brain are most important for a conscious state. In this new paper, though, researchers turned up some important clues. Using electrodes across the brains of awake and sleeping macaques, as well as macaques under different forms of anesthesia, the team found two key pathways in the monkeys' brains for consciousness. The researchers also found a specific brain region that seems to get those pathways going, like an engine they could start using some highly specialized jumper cables. That region is known as the central lateral thalamus.


But that doesn't mean they've found the seat of consciousness in the brain.

Thursday, 3 January 2019

Contact with monkeys and apes puts populations at risk


Date:  December 27, 2018
Source:  PLOS
Animal diseases that infect humans are a major threat to human health, and diseases often spillover to humans from nonhuman primates. Now, researchers reporting in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases have carried out an extensive social sciences evaluation of how populations in Cameroon interact with nonhuman primates, pointing toward behaviors that could put people at risk of infection with new diseases.
Zoonotic diseases -- those which originate in other animal species before spilling over to humans -- now constitute more than 60 percent of emerging infectious diseases. Of these zoonotic diseases, 70 percent reportedly come from wild animals. Because of the similarity between humans and nonhuman primates, these monkeys and apes serve as frequent reservoirs or amplifiers for pathogens that pose a risk to human populations.
In the new work, Tamara Giles-Vernick of the Institut Pasteur, France, and Victor Narat of the French Center for National Scientific Research, with their colleagues carried out surveys, real-time data collection, oral history interviews, and wild meat surveys to paint a full picture of the physical exposure of people in southeastern Cameroon to nonhuman primate species. Data were collected in 2016 and 2017 and included information from multiple villages and hundreds of people.

Sunday, 10 September 2017

Monkeys with Parkinson's disease benefit from human stem cells


Transplantation of neurons made from induced pluripotent stem cells show long-term benefit in monkeys with Parkinson's disease

Date: August 30, 2017
Source: Center for iPS Cell Research and Application - Kyoto University

Summary:
Japanese neurosurgeons report two new strategies to improve outcomes of iPS cell-based therapies for Parkinson's disease in monkey brains. The findings are a key step for patient recruitment of the first iPS cell-based therapy to treat neurodegenerative diseases.


Sunday, 2 July 2017

Monkey-Mapping Satellites Could Identify At-Risk Populations




By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer | June 27, 2017 12:20pm ET


In the Amazon rainforests that are home to hundreds of known species of monkeys — and likely more that have yet to be discovered — it can be extremely difficult for conservationists to track their numbers and monitor how they are affected by human activities such as hunting and deforestation.

However, scientists proposed in a recent study that a diverse range of technologies, including satellites, can combine with observations on the ground to give a more accurate picture of biodiversity among monkeys and other animals in hard-to-access habitats.

Most satellites can't directly detect the activities and numbers of small animals living in dense forests. But together with DNA evidence, field reports, and audio and visual records, they could help researchers identify monkey populations that are declining or at risk, the study authors reported. 

Sunday, 19 February 2017

Monkey fights help explain tipping points in animal societies






Date: February 10, 2017
Source: Santa Fe Institute

Previous studies of flocks, swarms, and schools suggest that animal societies may verge on a "critical" point -- in other words, they are extremely sensitive and can be easily tipped into a new social regime. But exactly how far animal societies sit from the critical point and what controls that distance remain unknown.

Now an analysis of conflicts within a captive community of pigtail macaque monkeys has helped to answer these questions by showing how agitated monkeys can precipitate critical, large-scale brawls. In the study, fights were often small, involving just two or three monkeys, but sometimes grew to be very large, with as many as 30 of the 48 adults in the society. Bryan Daniels at the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems, together with David Krakauer and Jessica Flack of the Santa Fe Institute, used ideas and models from statistical mechanics to ask whether the monkeys' conflict behavior was near a critical point. They report what they found in this week's Nature Communications.

Daniels, Krakauer, and Flack discovered that the distance from the critical point can be measured in terms of the "number of monkeys" that have to become agitated to push the system over the edge. Daniels says that in this system "agitating four or five individuals at a time can cause the system to destabilize and huge fights to break out." However, Daniels says, each monkey makes a distinct contribution to group sensitivity -- and these individual differences may allow distance from the critical point to be more easily controlled. Group members that break up fights can move the system away from the critical point by quelling the monkeys that contribute most to group sensitivity. Other group members, by targeting and agitating these individuals, can move the system towards the critical point and ready it for reconfiguration.

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