Doctoral Dissertation Improvement: Assessing the Interaction of Risk Aversion and Social Organization in Juvenile Primates

博士论文改进：评估幼年灵长类动物的风险规避和社会组织的相互作用

• 批准号: 0824372
• 负责人: Anthony Di Fiore
• 金额: $ 1.16万
• 依托单位: New York University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-08-01 至 2009-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0824372&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Improvement; Assessing; Interaction

Primates are unique among mammals in having extended periods of juvenile dependency. Several evolutionary explanations for this prolonged juvenile phase have been proposed, but few of these have been tested in the field, in part because juveniles have rarely been the focus of behavioral research. The few field studies that have explicitly examined juvenile development in primates have focused on taxa that live in female philopatric and female-bonded social groups, neglecting the broad diversity in social organization found in the rest of the Order. By contrast, this study will provide new data on juvenile development and life histories for wild taxa living in societies characterized by a high level of female dispersal, either in cohesive (lowland woolly monkeys, Lagothrix poeppigii) or fission-fusion (white-bellied spider monkeys, Ateles belzebuth) social groups in the Yasuni Biosphere Reserve, Ecuador. In collecting an array of behavioral and developmental data, this study will examine how aspects of juvenile development and behavior may be explicitly tied to social organization, primarily through examining aspects of predation avoidance, food competition and efficiency, and social development that are expected to vary in the different social environments offered by fission-fusion and cohesive groups. This research will also provide the first comparative field test of the most widely accepted explanation for the evolution of extended juvenility in primates, the Ecological Risk Aversion Hypothesis, which argues that the extended juvenile phase in primates is the result of a metabolic slowdown during development arising from the need to remain in the center of social groups to elude predators where high food competition prevents adequate food intake.Ultimately, this study will fill important gaps in our understanding of the juvenile phase in primates, both through increasing the diversity of juvenile primate data available and by explicitly linking social organization to juvenile behavioral development, which may in turn shed light on the evolution of the markedly extended juvenile phase seen in primates, including humans. Additionally, the scientific presence at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station fostered by the project will enable the training of several field assistants from primate habitat countries, and contribute to the biological station?s mission of Ecuadorian education, ecological discovery, and Amazonian conservation.

灵长类动物在哺乳动物中是独一无二的，它们有很长的幼年依赖期。对于这种延长的幼年期，已经提出了几种进化上的解释，但很少有人在实地进行过测试，部分原因是少年很少成为行为研究的焦点。少数明确研究灵长类动物青少年发育的实地研究集中在生活在女性philopatric和女性结合的社会群体中的分类群，忽视了在秩序的其他部分发现的社会组织的广泛多样性。相比之下，这项研究将提供新的数据少年的发展和生活史的野生类群生活在社会的特点是高水平的女性分散，无论是在凝聚力（低地毛猴，Lagothrix poeppixum）或裂变融合（白腹蜘蛛猴，Ateles belzebuth）的亚苏尼生物圈保护区，厄瓜多尔的社会群体。在收集一系列的行为和发展的数据，本研究将探讨青少年的发展和行为方面可能会明确地联系到社会组织，主要是通过研究方面的捕食避免，食物竞争和效率，以及社会发展，预计会有所不同的裂变融合和凝聚力群体提供的不同的社会环境。这项研究还将提供第一个比较实地测试的最广泛接受的解释灵长类动物的延长少年的进化，生态风险厌恶假说，该研究认为，灵长类动物的幼年期延长是由于发育过程中代谢减慢的结果，这是由于需要保持在社会群体的中心，以躲避捕食者，因为高度的食物竞争阻碍了充足的食物。摄入量。最终，这项研究将填补我们对灵长类动物青少年阶段的理解中的重要空白，通过增加可用的青少年灵长类动物数据的多样性，并明确将社会组织与青少年行为发展联系起来，这反过来可能揭示灵长类动物（包括人类）中显着延长的青少年阶段的演变。 此外，由该项目促成的蒂普蒂尼生物多样性站的科学存在将能够培训来自灵长类动物栖息地国家的几名实地助理，并为生物站做出贡献？它的使命是厄瓜多尔的教育、生态发现和亚马逊河流域的保护。