Primates
laelaps | August 5, 2008A female Western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla). Photographed at the WCS-run Bronx zoo.Nature still holds fascinating secrets that have yet to be discovered. Yesterday saw the announcement of the world's smallest known snake, for instance, but today a discovery of greater magnitude has been announced by the Wildlife Conservation Society. According to a recent census there are approximately 125,000 Western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) in two adjacent areas of northern Congo, more than doubling the number thought to be present previously.
This is certainly welcome news, yet we should not let it lull…
laelaps | August 5, 2008Western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla), photographed July 23th, 2008 at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | July 31, 2008Western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla), photographed July 23th, 2008 at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | July 29, 2008A black-crested gibbon (Nomascus concolor), photographed July 23th, 2008 at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | July 26, 2008Western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla, a silverback male [top] and females [middle and bottom]), photographed July 23th, 2008 at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | July 23, 2008Given that today is a weekday and the weather forecast predicted a 90% chance of heavy thunderstorms I thought that the Bronx zoo would be mostly empty. I was way off. At times the crush of the crowds, vacationers and neon-clad elementary school groups, was almost too much to bear and I was actually a bit relieved when I made it home just as the storm broke.
Oddly enough it seems that many of the animals were frustrated today, too; snow leopards, rock hyraxes, small-clawed otters, and other animals were tussling with each other throughout the day. Still, despite the frequent bumps, jostles,…
laelaps | July 20, 2008A young Verreaux's Sifaka (Propithecus verreauxi), photographed July 15th, 2008 at the Philadelphia zoo.
laelaps | July 10, 2008A gelada (Theropithecus gelada, right) and a rock hyrax (Procavia capensis, left). Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
laelaps | July 8, 2008A ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta). Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
laelaps | July 6, 2008
A clip from the Nature documentary "Murder in the Troop."Before June of last year I didn't particularly like baboons. They seemed to be aggressive, ill-tempered monkeys that more often provoked a small sense of revulsion in me than curiosity. (In fact, for most of my life I thought primates were pretty boring; didn't they just sit around eating leaves and picking ticks off each other?) Then I happened to pick up Robert Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoir and that all changed. There was so much I didn't know about them and by the time I put down Sapolsky's book I had an interest and affection for…
laelaps | July 5, 2008A young western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) fast asleep against an adult female. Photographed at the Bronx zoo on July 5th, 2008.
laelaps | June 27, 2008A female lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) photographed at the Bronx zoo in 2007.According to Reuters the Spanish Congress is set to extend legal rights to apes in captivity, ending cruel experiments, isolation in circuses, and other forms of mistreatment. (Zoos will still be allowed to keep apes but the conditions there must be improved.) Although not yet passed, the legislation has enough support that victory is close. The folks behind the Great Ape Project have been pivotal in pushing this initiative and I sincerely hope that other countries in which apes are still subject to cruelty in…
laelaps | June 23, 2008A female Western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) photographed last year at the Bronx Zoo.That's the question posed in the cover story of the latest issue of National Geographic. On July 22, 2007 five mountain gorillas (Gorilla berengei berengei) were murdered at Virunga, the population made famous by the work of Dian Fossey and her book Gorillas in the Mist. Combined with an earlier attack in the area seven gorillas were executed for unknown reasons within the space of two months, the presence of several warring Congolese militia factions in the area providing an overabundance of suspects but a…
laelaps | April 26, 2008A female Western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) photographed last year at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | April 23, 2008A female lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) photographed at the Bronx Zoo.By the year 1799, the Great Chain of Being had effectively been sundered, although some still clutched the shattered links in the hope that some linear order to the Creation would be found. The concept was no longer tenable, Charles White having to base his entire case for the superiority of Europeans over people of Asian and African descent (each "race" acting as a species to fill in a slot in the chain of "lower" to "higher") in An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables on…
laelaps | April 17, 2008When Linnaeus was attempting to organize "the Creation," he gave the chimpanzee the binomial Homo troglodytes. Since Edward Tyson's 1699 dissection of a "pigmie" (a juvenile chimpanzee [see Gould's essay "To Show An Ape" in The Flamingo's Smile]), the close resemblance between apes and humans has been recognized, even if a recognition of our actual evolutionary relationship has been harder won.
Sometimes Tyson's landmark work is heralded as a true understanding of the relationship between humans and apes, but in fact it was primarily an attempt to weld on a "missing link" in the Great Chain…
laelaps | April 9, 2008Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller, left), Cheeta (center), and Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan, right)Today Cheeta, the world's oldest chimpanzee, celebrates his 76th birthday. He is most famous for his role in a number of Tarzan films, and his last big screen appearance was as "Chee Chee" in 1967's Dr. Doolittle. Presently Cheeta resides at the CHEETA Primate Sanctuary in California, and a ghostwritten memoir of his life called Me Cheeta is due to be published this fall.
[Hat-tip to John Lynch]
laelaps | March 18, 2008Last year, in a paper published in the journal Current Biology, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani reported on their observation of ten different chimpanzees thrusting wooden "spears" into holes in trees 22 times over the course of more than a year, presumably to stun bush babies that sleep in the hollows during the day. The report has been somewhat controversial, especially since chimpanzees often shove sticks and twigs into holes, but the observations are receiving some new attention in a National Geographic article about the Fongoli population in Senegal.
Before considering what the Current…
laelaps | March 12, 2008A few weeks ago I picked up a slew of old anthropology books, many of which were at least minimally concerned with figuring out what makes our species human (or what defines "Man," to put things in their historical context). Bipedalism, making tools, and language were the classic examples of features that separate us from the "beasts,"* but prior to any of these books Charles Darwin noticed that it would be practically impossible to point to any one point in our evolutionary history and claim that specific point as the time that our ancestors became human. Even in a time when transitional…