Resources

This page is going to be strictly for posting articles. They are going to be listed in alphabetical order for now, but if we get more articles relating to specific things I’ll add subcategories and create specific pages. I’m hoping that overtime we can gather many different resources for people to enjoy and look through! For now, here are a few of my own that I’ve read and I’ve found interesting. If you’d like me to add an article you found, please contact me and I’ll get it up! Thank you!

Assessing Anxiety in Nonhuman Primates
By: Kristine Coleman and Peter J. Pierre

Anxiety can be broadly described as a psychological state in which normally innocuous environmental stimuli trigger negative emotional expectations. Human anxiety disorders are multidimensional and may be organic or acquired, situational or pervasive. The broad ranging nature of the anxiety phenotype speaks to the need for models that identify its various components and root causes to develop effective clinical treatments. The cross-species comparative approach to modeling anxiety disorders in animals aims to understand mechanisms that both contribute to and modulate anxiety. Nonhuman primate models provide an important bridge from nonprimate model systems because of the complexity of nonhuman primates’ biobehavioral capacities and their commonalities with human emotion. The broad goal of this review is to provide an overview of various procedures available to study anxiety in the nonhuman primate, with a focus on the behavioral aspects of anxiety. Commonly used methods covered in this review include assessing animals in their home environment or in response to an ethologically relevant threat, associative conditioning and startle response tests, and cognitive bias tests. We also discuss how these procedures can help veterinarians and researchers care for captive nonhuman primates.

Behavioral Abnormalities in Captive Nonhuman Primates
By: Avanti Mallapur and B. C. Choudhury 

In this study, we dealt with 11 species of nonhuman primates across 10 zoos in India. We recorded behavior as instantaneous scans between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. In the study, we segregated behaviors for analyses into abnormal, undesirable, active, and resting. The 4 types of abnormal behavior exhibited included floating limb, self-biting, self-clasping, and stereotypic pacing. In the study, we recorded 2 types of undesirable behavior: autoerotic stimulation and begging. Langurs and group-housed macaques did not ex- hibit undesirable behaviors. A male lion-tailed macaque and a male gibbon exhibited begging behavior. autoerotic stimulation and self-biting occurred rarely. Males exhib- ited higher levels of undesirable behavior than did females. Animals confiscated from touring zoos, circuses, and animal traders exhibited higher levels of abnormal behaviors than did animals reared in larger, recognized zoos. The stump-tailed macaque was the only species to exhibit floating limb, autoerotic stimulation, self-biting, and self-clasping. Our results show that rearing experience and group composition influ- ence the proportions of abnormal behavior exhibited by nonhuman primates in captiv- ity. The history of early social and environmental deprivation in these species of captive nonhuman primates probably is critical in the development of behavioral pathologies. Establishing this will require further research.

Behavioral Response of Mothers and Infants to Variation in Maternal Condition: Adaptation, Compensation, and Resilience
By: Lynn A. Fairbanks and Katie Hinde

There has been a surge of interest in gestational and neonatal influences on developmental trajectories in humans and other mammals in recent years, and there is evidence that maternal nutritional ecology can affect offspring growth trajectories, metabolic processes, and vulnerability for chronic disease later in life (Bateson et al. 2004 ; Langley-Evans 2006 ; Rutherford 2009 ) . There has been less emphasis on behavioral responses of mothers and infants to variation in maternal diet and condition during pregnancy and lactation. This chapter will focus on the effects of maternal condition on the mother–infant relationship in nonhuman primates, with consideration of long-term effects on offspring behavioral development. To understand the impact of variation in maternal investment on infant development, it is important to recognize that infants are not simply the passive recipients of variation in maternal care. Infant behavior and development evolved in the context of variation in maternal care, and selection has likely favored strategies for infants to get what they need for physical and social development.

Grieving female monkeys drink own milk after losing infants

Mate-guarding constrains feeding activity but not energetic status of wild male long-tailed macaques
By: Cédric Girard-Buttonz, Michael Heistermann, Erdiansyah Rahmi, Anna Marzec, Muhammad Agil, Panji Ahmad Fauzan, Antje Engelhardt

Mate-guarding is an important determinant of male reproductive success in a number of species. Little is known however about the constraints of this behaviour, e.g. the associated energetic costs. We investigated these costs in long-tailed macaques where alpha males mate guard females to a lesser extent than predicted by the priority of access model. The study was carried out during two mating periods on three wild groups living in the Gunung Leuser National Park, Indonesia. We combined behavioural observations on males’ locomotion and feeding activity, GPS records of distance travelled and non-invasive measurements of urinary C-peptide (UCP), a physiological indicator of male energetic status. Mate-guarding led to a decrease in feeding time and fruit consumption suggesting a reduced intake of energy. At the same time, vertical locomotion was reduced, which potentially saved energy. These findings, together with the fact that we did not find an effect of mate-guarding on UCP levels, suggest that energy intake and expenditure was balanced during mate-guarding in our study males. Mate-guarding thus seems to not be energetically costly under all circumstances. Given that in strictly seasonal rhesus macaques, high-ranking males lose physical condition over the mating period, we hypothesise that the energetic costs of mate-guarding vary inter-specifically depending on the degree of seasonality and that males of non-strictly seasonal species might be better adapted to maintain balanced energetic condition year-round. Finally, our results illustrate the importance of combining behavioural assessments of both energy intake and expenditure with physiological measures when investigating energetic costs of behavioural strategies.

Maternal aggression in lactating female Japanese macaques: Time course and interindividual variation
By: Schino, Gabriele & d’Amato, Francesca & Troisi, Alfonso

This study investigated the aggressive behavior of female Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata (Blyth, 1875)) during lactation. Following parturition, the frequency of aggression showed an initial decline during weeks 12 of infant life, then increased to peak during weeks 78 post partum, and finally declined again to prepartum levels. Neither the initial decline nor the subsequent increase in aggression rate post partum was related to sociodemographic characteristics of the motherinfant dyad or to measures of maternal style. These results suggest that variation in postpartum aggression may be influenced less by the quality of the motherinfant relationship than by the mother’s relationships the mother has with group mates.

Maternal Defense: Breastfeeding Heightens Aggression by Reducing Stress
By: Hahn-Holbrook, Jennifer & Holt-Lunstad, Julianne & Holbrook, Colin & Coyne, Sarah & Lawson, E.

Mothers in numerous species exhibit heightened aggression in defense of their young. This shift typically coincides with the duration of lactation in nonhuman mammals, which suggests that human mothers may display similarly accentuated aggressiveness while breast feeding. Here we report the first behavioral evidence for heightened aggression in lactating humans. Breast-feeding mothers inflicted louder and longer punitive sound bursts on unduly aggressive confederates than did formula-feeding mothers or women who had never been pregnant. Maternal aggression in other mammals is thought to be facilitated by the buffering effect of lactation on stress responses. Consistent with the animal literature, our results showed that while lactating women were aggressing, they exhibited lower systolic blood pressure than did formula-feeding or neverpregnant women while they were aggressing. Mediation analyses indicated that reduced arousal during lactation may disinhibit female aggression. Together, our results highlight the contributions of breast feeding to both protecting infants and buffering maternal stress.

Scratching as a behavioral index of anxiety in macaque mothers
By: Troisi, Alfonso & Schino, Gabriele & D’Antoni, Monica & Pandolfi, Nicoletta & Aureli, Filippo & d’Amato, Francesca.

The aim of this study was to assess the validity of the notion that anxiety influences maternal style in monkeys. To this end, we investigated the correlations between measures of the quality of mother-infant relationship and scratching, a behavior pattern that reflects a state of anxiety. The subjects were seven group-living macaque mothers and their infants observed during the first 12 weeks postpartum. Postpartum scratching by the mothers was positively correlated with both maternal possessiveness and maternal warmth, two composite measures of the quality of mother-infant relationship that reflect a possessive and attentive maternal style. Evaluation of the correlations between maternal rank and scratching before and after parturition indicated that interactions with their infants, not those with other group companions, were the main source of anxiety for the mothers. These results support the notion that anxiety influences maternal style in monkeys and suggest that studies aimed at investigating physiological and social correlates of maternal emotionality in nonhuman primates could use scratching as a useful and simple behavioral measure.