Researchers have found male chimpanzees in Bossou, Guinea successfully deactiving snares put out by hunters. This practice has not yet been seen in other chimpanzee populations.

Snares can seriously injure chimpanzees often causing them to lose limbs and can be fatal as well. The researchers are unsure how the chimpanzees learned the skill as trial and error would be almost impossible. It appears as  if the animals “knew” which parts not to touch as they explicitly avoided them.

An Anthropological Exploration of the Brain, Language, Emotion, Culture, and our Evolutionary Past.

Tentative Outline of Talks:
9am – Coffee and Student Posters
10am – Georg Striedter – Principles of Brain Evolution (evolutionary neurobiology based talk)
11am – Michael Arbib -Mirror Neurons and More: Language and Tool Use
12am – Clark Barrett – (evolutionary psychology based talk)
1pm – Lunch
2pm – Katerina Semendeferi – ( Evolution of emotional and cognitive processes in hominoids)
3pm – Sang-Hee Lee – (Changes in brain morphology over evolutionary time)
4pm – Meet and Greet

Featuring guest speakers:

Georg Striedter, UCI Neurobiology & Behavior
http://striedterlab.bio.uci.edu/StriedterLaboratory/page4/page13/page13.html

Michael A. Arbib – Director, USC Brain Project
http://www.usc.edu/programs/neuroscience/faculty/profile.php?fid=16

Clark Barrett, UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/barrett/

Katerina Semendeferi, UCSD Anthropology/Neuroscience
http://anthropology.ucsd.edu/Faculty_Profiles/semendeferi.html

Sang-Hee Lee, UCR Anthropology
http://faculty.ucr.edu/~shlee/

In addition 2 PSA members as well as 3 other Anthropology students will be presenting posters at the Symposium so come out and support your classmates!

Researchers from USA, Ethiopia and Norway (including CSUF’s own Dr. Peter Fashing) have helped to shed light on a relatively unknown monkey in Ethiopia known as the Bale monkey, named for the forests of the Bale massif and Hagere Selam regions of southeastern Ethiopia. The bale monkey had been considered to difficult to study due to environmental conditions such as fog and mountainous terrain.  The big discovery was that the bale monkey relies on bamboo for its main sustenance. Only one other primate is known for this, the bamboo lemur of Madagascar. Check out the article for more info and look into the paper in The International Journal of Primatology if you are more interested!

A new study using DNA techniques found traces of monkeys and duikers in the feces of gorillas in Loango National Park in Gabon. While the news sounds exciting more research is necessary to confirm if the gorillas may actually be consuming meat as opposed to eating insects that feed on mammals or one of the animals contaminating the feces samples before they were collected. Interesting area for future research nonetheless!

The Upcoming Forum
Mate choice in humans and nonhuman primates

24 April 2010
Cal State Fullerton

Directions and Parking

http://www.fullerton.edu/campusmap/

PROGRAM

8:30 Check in, coffee, bagels

9:00 Opening remarks

9:15 Greg Grether (UCLA)
Mate choice and the evolution of indicator traits: insights from research on guppies and other animal model systems

10:15 Break

10:30 Joe Manson (UCLA)
New directions in non-human primate mate choice research

11:30 Lunch

1:00 Martin Muller (University of New Mexico)
Male sexual coercion and female choice in wild chimpanzees

2:00 Break

2:15 Jim Roney (UCSB)
New directions in the study of human mate choice

3:15 Elizabeth Pillsworth (CSUF)
Mate choice among the Shuar of Ecuador: Stated versus revealed preferences

4:15 Close

SCPRF Advisory Committee: Norm Rosen (SCRPF/CSUF), Raffaela Commitante (CSUF), Peter Fashing (CSUF), Lynne Miller (Mira Costa College), Jim Moore (UCSD), Nga Nguyen (CSUF)
ADMISSION: Free to CSU Fullerton students with ID; other students $7 (with ID); $12 general admission. Pay at the door.

To make sure there’s enough coffee & food, please RSVP to Nga Nguyen at amboseli@gmail.com, putting SCPRF RSVP in the email header.

Posters

Beginning in November 2006, SCPRF plans to host a poster session at the November Forum only; this will be a regular feature of the Nov. Forum, so participants can plan ahead. If you are interested, please see the guidelines below and direct inquiries to Lynne Miller.
The poster session is an excellent venue for Undergraduate and Master’s level students to present their research and gain experience in a friendly and low pressure context. The poster session will convene during the one hour afternoon coffee break.

Please note: poster content does not have to reflect the meeting topic; we will consider posters presenting information on a wide range of subject matter.

This poster session continues to be a great success and we would like very much to see it continue. If you are a student, or know of a student, who is ready to present, please submit names and proposed titles to

Lynne Miller lmiller@miracosta.edu
Space will be limited, the earlier you respond the more likely we can include the poster.

Posters should be mounted on folding poster boards measuring 36″ X 48″ (when folded they measure 36″ X 24″) which can be purchased at most office supplies stores. General guidelines for how to put a poster together can be found at www.asp.org/education/howto_onPosters.html or at http://faculty.ucr.edu/~maryb/poster.htm

http://www.thecovemovie.com/

Synopsis

The Cove begins in Taiji, Japan, where former dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry has come to set things right after a long search for redemption. In the 1960s, it was O’Barry who captured and trained the 5 dolphins who played the title character in the international television sensation “Flipper.”

But his close relationship with those dolphins – the very dolphins who sparked a global fascination with trained sea mammals that continues to this day — led O’Barry to a radical change of heart. One fateful day, a heartbroken Barry came to realize that these deeply sensitive, highly intelligent and self-aware creatures so beautifully adapted to life in the open ocean must never be subjected to human captivity again. This mission has brought him to Taiji, a town that appears to be devoted to the wonders and mysteries of the sleek, playful dolphins and whales that swim off their coast.

But in a remote, glistening cove, surrounded by barbed wire and “Keep Out” signs, lies a dark reality. It is here, under cover of night, that the fishermen of Taiji, driven by a multi-billion dollar dolphin entertainment industry and an underhanded market for mercury-tainted dolphin meat, engage in an unseen hunt. The nature of what they do is so chilling — and the consequences are so dangerous to human health — they will go to great lengths to halt anyone from seeing it.

Undeterred, O’Barry joins forces with filmmaker Louis Psihoyos and the Oceanic Preservation Society to get to the truth of what’s really going on in the cove and why it matters to everyone in the world. With the local Chief of Police hot on their trail and strong-arm fishermen keeping tabs on them, they will recruit an “Ocean’s Eleven”-style team of underwater sound and camera experts, special effects artists, marine explorers, adrenaline junkies and world-class free divers who will carry out an undercover operation to photograph the off-limits cove, while playing a cloak-and-dagger game with those who would have them jailed. The result is a provocative mix of investigative journalism, eco-adventure and arresting imagery that adds up to an urgent plea for hope.

Hello everyone! Welcome to the Spring 2010 semester!

The Primatology Students Association will be holding meetings beginning this Wednesday, February 10th at 5:00 p.m. and will continue every other Wednesday. We should be holding the meetings in MH 428 but if we are not in there we will be in the Anthropology office in MH 426. We have an exciting semester coming up as the Southern California Primate Research Forum will be held at CSUF this term and we will also be doing some more fundraising. Please stop by and see what we are all about! If you love animals and/or primates this may be the club for you!

Check out this link for a short video of the Cross-River Gorilla! This is the first time these rare apes have been caught by a professional camera as they are very hard to track and have not been habituated to human presence.