SBE-UKRI: Form and function of primate natal coats

在许多灵长类动物中，婴儿的颜色与成人的颜色和背景颜色截然不同。为什么一个群体中最脆弱的成员会对威胁如此明显？这个项目调查了这个问题，并为灵长类动物社会系统中婴儿的角色提供了见解。这项研究将创建和管理一个新的可公开访问的灵长类物种标准化图像数据库，以及生活史、社会和生态数据，其结果将有助于我们理解为什么一些动物在其一生中会改变颜色。该项目将培训两名博士后研究人员和全球数十名研究人员，其中包括许多灵长类动物原生地国家的研究人员，以研究动物颜色的客观摄影。该项目的综合教育和推广项目为从幼儿园到研究生院的学生提供教育和培训机会，重点是通过现有的机构和专业协会附属项目提高代表性，保留和培训代表性不足的少数民族学者。关于某些物种中婴儿显著性的功能，人们提出了许多观点，但尚未进行严格的研究。这些措施包括警告可能杀害婴儿的群体外雄性或捕食者，婴儿将由群体保护，混淆婴儿的父亲以防止杀婴，帮助照顾者跟踪婴儿，并促进母亲和非母亲照顾婴儿。这个项目通过客观地测量许多灵长类动物在婴儿期的许多个体的颜色来测试这些假设，对不同物种的婴儿颜色进行全面的比较分析，以及行为实验来衡量母亲，父亲和非父亲对不同颜色的婴儿的反应。在全球的动物园、保护区和研究中心，当地的研究人员在整个发育过程中拍摄婴儿的照片，使用校准和标准化的数码摄影来测量颜色。然后使用依赖于视觉系统的方法对这些图像进行处理，以获得来自80个不同灵长类物种的250个个体的灵长类婴儿外观的“接受者视角”，并通过实验操纵图像的颜色来评估群体中不同成年成员的反应。跨灵长类物种的比较分析测试了每一种功能假设所做出的预测，即婴儿的颜色应该如何与物种的行为、生态和社会系统相关。本项目由生物人类学（SBE）和行为系统研究小组（BIO）共同资助。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The color of infants in many primates stand out clearly against adult and background color. Why and how should the most vulnerable members of a group be so conspicuous to threats? This project investigates this question and offers insight into the role of infants in the social systems of primates. The research will create and curate a new publicly accessible standardized image database of primate species alongside life history, social and ecological data and results will contribute to our understanding of why some animals change color over their lifetimes. The project will train two postdoctoral researchers plus dozens of researchers globally, including many in primate native range countries, in objective photography for studying animal coloration. The project’s comprehensive education and outreach program provides education and training opportunities to students from kindergarten to graduate school with a focus on enhancing the representation, retention, and training of underrepresented minority scholars through existing institutional and professional association-affiliated programs. Many ideas for the function of infant conspicuousness in some species have been proposed but not rigorously investigated. These include warning potentially infanticidal out-group males or predators that the infant will be defended by the group, confusing the paternity of infants to prevent infanticide, helping caregivers keep track of the infant, and facilitating the care of infants by mothers and non-mothers. This project tests these hypotheses by objectively measuring the color of many individuals from many primate species throughout infancy, carrying out a comprehensive comparative analysis of infant coloration across species, along with behavioral experiments to measure how mothers, fathers and non-fathers respond to differently colored infants. Color is measured using calibrated and standardized digital photography at zoos, sanctuaries and research centers globally, with local researchers photographing infants throughout the period of development. These are then be processed using visual-system dependent methods to get a ‘receiver-eye-view’ of primate infant appearance for 250 individuals from 80 different primate species, and by experimentally manipulating the coloration of images to assess response by different adult members of the group. Comparative analyses across primate species test the predictions made by each of the functional hypotheses about how infant color should relate to species’ behavior, ecology, and social system. This project is funded jointly by Biological Anthropology (SBE) and Behavioral Systems Cluster (BIO).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.