As we continue, the next topic that we're going to be addressing is going to be primates worldwide. What we're going to be focusing on within this particular section are going to be our primate habitats. Again, this will be an overview to the entire section and then as we get towards the end, we'll start to drill down specifically towards those 25 top endangered primates. What we have here is just a figure from Fleagle and it is showing where current living primates and then where fossils of primates have existed. So in that living area. Centers right across the equator there, both north and south. We can see that this is a tropical radiation. When we look at the fossil record for primates, we actually find that they were much more widespread from down to the southern tip of Patagonia and then all the way well past Wyoming in the United States and then all throughout Europe. A very wide distribution but a lot of that really has to do with the fact that the climate has changed so much over time and over the epochs of the earth. Primates are found naturally on five of seven continents, and it's really only humans on Australia and Antarctica. Although I'm certainly Macaque could probably do okay in Antarctica. They got into some of the same habitats that humans hang out in. We find them in some temporary regions. Japan and Nepal are examples of that. But really, they're the exceptions to the rules on this. The important point that we can take away from this is that primates really are found in a variety of habitats. The fact that they can range from deserts to tropical rain forests, a very wide distribution when you think about where animals are living. I want to spend a couple of minutes and just go through some of these, I'll call them ecology basics; a way to center the animals and center ourselves and how we want to be thinking about this and how we can start to really play in some of these conservation implications. If we extend this analogy we can say, "Where does a primate live?" The primate lives in their house. The first one really being, what is the size of the house and the neighborhood in which it's found? Are we talking about an animal that has to live in a very specific area and that area is only found in the small portion of that neighborhood, so to speak? Or is it one of those that can be a far-ranging and far and wide application in the species throughout the entire area? Number two, what's the specific location of the house within the neighborhood? This can be talking about, do they live only at the tops of the trees, do they live in the middle of the trees? Do they live only on the forest floor? How much do they actually move around through some of these things? When we looked at studies in the neotropics, there's some great research that's been done in terms of dividing a forest out and showing how many species can be sympatric; species that can live together in the same forest because they utilize different portions of that forest. As I just said, how is the space within this house partitioned, what is the arrangement of the rooms within the house and what type of structures are present? Again, stretching the analogy but it really does make you had to think about how you move about. If you guys watch birds at all, you can see that there are certainly different species of birds that utilize different parts of the canopy and that's how you can get all these different species living in the same area without necessarily competing with each other. How's the temperature maintained in the area and how is it heated and cooled? What is going on in terms of air exchange? Is it always hot and humid down to the forest floor? Does it get more open and airy higher-up in the canopies? What does the forest structure look like and how does that vary and how does that affect how animals are using that forest? Definitely a very important limiting factor, where does water come from and how is waste disposed of? Is it a seasonal rainforest? Does it rain through the entire year? Does it rain for just a couple of months? In parts of Vietnam where I've worked, it's not unusual for there to be no rain at all during the dry season, and then for them to get over three meters, over nine feet of rain in just a short couple of months, and that's what sustains the entire area. Where do these animals get water to drink from? Are there seasonal river beds? Are there other watercourses that they can investigate? Do they get all their moisture from leaves? Are there hollows within the tree that will retain water where they'll come and visit that? Then the question of how is waste disposed of? As I mentioned, I've done a little bit of parasite research. Because as you start to get more restricted forests, you start getting more and more animals coming in close contact with both other species of primates and then other species in general in the forest. What does that do for disease transfer? What happens when we start playing and teasing out some of those details? What and who comes in and out of the specific household area? Again, nobody lives within this particular vacuum. There are many animals that overlap through all these areas, so what's the effect of that? What kind of animals will predators, will prey species come into contact through these areas? Where is food located, and when and how does food get there? As we wrap up the end of this lesson, we'll talk a little bit about home range and day range and seasonal variation within that. All of these are quite important questions in terms of, we'll say, how large that houses or whether there are varied and multiple homesteads. What do we know about the individuals who live in the house and how do they use it? Do males use the areas differently than females? Do the young tend to hang out in congregate more with males or with females? Each one of those individuals is going to need to be making their own lifeways as they progress through their life history, and some of these things really change in very. The more we know about this, the more we can apply these ecological basic rules towards species, the better understanding we have of their conservation needs. Primate biomes. Let's go ahead and just define biome for a moment. If we say a major regional or global community, such as grassland or forest, characterized chiefly by the dominant forms of plant life, animals, and the prevailing climate. We're talking about abiotic and biotic factors here. How does the biome affect primate adaptations? If we go back to our thoughts about adaptive radiation, body size, diets, activity pattern, and locomotive pattern, all of them are going to be affected. They both feedback on each other. Not all biomes will be able to support the same number and types of animals. This really becomes a limiting factor. If we have a biome that can only support a small amount of animals, to begin with, and we start destroying or degrading that biome, then obviously the carrying capacity is going to become a severe limiting factor. We're going to start cutting down on what's able to stay within those particular areas. Again, implication for this. Because of this, animals, primates living in different biomes have developed different strategies for survival. We take this biome concept and we can move that a little bit further, we can talk about biogeography. Comparative observational science seeks to identify patterns in the distribution of plants and animals and the geographic regions in which they are found. When we start talking about some of the conservation organizations, there are definitely different ideas on species conservation. Some people and some organizations look at it as an individual species needs to be conserved. Here we have a Stump-tailed macaque. They're found in Vietnam, found in another couple of locations, but it's definitely one of those, do we say that we want to have a project that's going to focus solely on this particular species, or do we need to have something that is larger? Do we want to look at the region? Do we want to look at the biome? How are you defining the scope of your investigations for this? Some of the locations, again, as we said they're tropical radiation, but we're going to talk about the tropics. So that's going to be the Tropic of Cancer in the north to the Tropic of Capricorn in the south. We could talk about temperate regions; both north of the Tropic of Cancer to the Arctic and then south of the Tropic of Capricorn to Antarctica. Wide swats in how we divide it. We can have subalpine areas, mountainous regions close to the treeline. We have some of our other snub-nosed monkeys who live in these particular areas. Very different environment that you wouldn't necessarily think about putting a monkey in. Our biotic factors, it can be described as any living component that affects another organism or shapes the ecosystem. So it's all the live things within the environment. Think of it as animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, and protists. We can also have our abiotic factors, the non-living chemical and physical parts of the environment that affect living organisms and the functioning of the ecosystems. Some of those can be water, soil, air, sunlight, temperature, and then minerals within the area. As I've said numerous times, let's go ahead and just reiterate one more time, major primate biomes of the earth are tropical. So if we look at this simple map of it, we can see for our Neotropics, we've got that swath right in the center, we've got howler monkeys, spider monkeys. In Africa, we have got gorillas, chimpanzees, baboons. On Madagascar, we've got our lemus. As we move into Asia, you've got orangutans, gibbons, macaques, langurs, proboscis monkeys. So really kind of the same map that we started off the class with, but now putting some of those characters into the fold. Just a neat little figure for this, so what we have in the upper left, we've got Africa there and it shows the 1,300 miles between the equator in the middle and the Tropic of Cancer at the top, the north of it. It's just showing this change in variation in forest types from it. So from equator, you've got lists as swamp or tropical rainforest, you've got secondary forests, you've got more of these grasslands and savanna, you've got these forest outliners, and then as you've moved from that savanna to steppe, you have acacias and shrubs, and then you hit that desert, a lack of plant within that particular area, than hitting that Tropic of Cancer. This entire wide swath, what we see is how have animals adapted to these particular environments. If we look at resource distribution, so we'll tackle this a little bit more and it'll definitely come up in some of the threats in terms of what are the environments these animals do really well in, and what happens when you really start to change these environments. So if we look in the upper left-hand corner here, you can either have small patches, so small areas of forest or small habitat areas, but you have a high food density, so lots of trees here listed out. So we'll assume that this is a species that eats leaves. You can have the smaller patch, and as long as you have this higher food density, everybody's going to be doing much better within that environment. If we just step to the right, we still have this high food density, but we're talking about a much larger patch. So here it's illustrated by these six trees within the environment. Again, the ability to most likely support a larger population of animals. As we move into the lower section of the figure, if we've got this smaller patches, but now we've got a low food density, and let's say that there's been selective logging through this particular area, obviously, as you start to diminish these food resources, only so many animals are going to be able to utilize that same stretch and same area of habitat. When you start talking about the forest matrix and how forests are actually arranged, what happens when you start to really go through and cut trees out or change those dynamics, change the [inaudible] around forest. It can greatly affect how animals will survive in that area. Then that last one in the bottom right-hand corner, if we have this very large patch of habitat, but a very low food density, now we're going to definitely talk about issues of how do animals move from one food resource to the next? What dangers are they going to encounter? Be it hunting from other animals or hunting from humans. Range use. So here we've got a figure. At the top and section A, is showing a day range. So how far do animals travel within one particular day? It's making the assumption that the animals do not return to the same spot every single night. We do have instances of animals doing that, but then we also have occurrences of chimpanzees that set up a new nest every night in a different spot in the forest. So maybe they walk and forage for a kilometer. Maybe for some of these animals, for much smaller creatures, maybe it's only going to be a couple meters before they go ahead and set up shop for the night. So if we take that analogy of the house, how far do you move in your house per day? The lower portion of it B, it's showing the animal over the entire time, so over the course of a year. So think of it as their home range. Maybe for the first month for January, they stay in one central location and then branch out a little bit further and further. But during certain times of the year, maybe in times when there's less resources, so we'll say dry season occurrence, the animals have to move much further in order to go and find their food, in order to get their groceries. So it's that full accumulation of that year, which will give a nice home range for creatures. Here we have an example of some of our mouse lemurs, and each one of these illustrates a different species. But what you can get at, from these particular home ranges, is how far the animals are actually moving. What are their general patterns? When we think about it, how much habitat, how much space, how big is the house that they're living in, and what do they need to survive? So if we go ahead and we take all that information and move forward and start to apply it towards our 25 top endangered primates, here we've got our map of the Neotropics and the species that we're going to be discussing. You can see with some of the creatures, so look at the orange one at the right-hand side there, alawader, so one of our howler monkeys, there's actually a fairly wide distributed range around there. If we're talking about, let's say the cebus so the guys in blue, one of our little capuchins, it's going to be a much smaller, more restricted area, and when we look at [inaudible] again, an even smaller area. So some of that's definitely going to be a contributing factor to why these animals are in such parallel right now. As we look at a map of Africa and some of the tax that we'll be discussing there, again, some creatures have a wider distribution. So our pan, so one of our chimps, much wider, colobus, one of our monkeys, much wider. But if we're looking at cyno, so the ones on the right, pilocolobus in purple, rungwecebus in green, and then paragolago in red, so we've got much more restricted areas. Pilocolobus in orange, really just a very small area that they are restricted to. Madagascar, we have an opportunity to talk about that. Of course, getting into the threats of deforestation and a lot of the slash and burn agriculture that goes on there. There's a lot of mining that goes on there, and we'll talk about forest coverage and forest change, and how much forest has been lost in Madagascar over the past couple of decades. But many of these species have very tiny restricted habitat. So if we talk about in purple the indri, a wider distribution, daubentonia, which are going to be our eyes, a wider distribution across the entirety of the island. But what population densities are we talking about? Then lepilemurs and microcebus, again, most likely small little forest blocks, other individual forest blocks, or a couple of small forest blocks in very restricted area. Distributions of the some of the species in Asia. So if we start off with green, so we've got hoolocks, so the hoolock gibbons, a wider distribution in terms of looking at general geography, but mostly confined in Myanmar, and then some small distribution to cross over into China. But if we look at trachypithecus poliocephalus, so are kept by golden lingers that's restricted in the North of Vietnam to Kappa Island, a very small restricted area that happens to be Vietnam's most important tourist destination. So some definitely conflicts there. But really just using this as a backdrop of talking about what are these habitats? What are the restrictions? Then thinking about what are some of the threats that we need to address in order to help conserve these species. So for our next video, we'll go ahead and we'll do a brief introduction to conservation. Start talking about some of the variation in conservation, preservation. Some of the modes and ideas that people have had about fortress conservation or community-based conservation, but really starting to delve into this bigger idea of it with some of the background we've got now in order to see what we can do about conserving some of these primates and hopefully helping them move forward. So I look forward to moving on with the conversation with you guys. I hope you're enjoying it and hope you get lots of questions coming up on what we can do.
