Commercial Fishing Estimated to Kill Millions of Sea Turtles

The number of sea turtles inadvertently snared by commercial fishing gear over the past 20 years may reach into the millions, according to the first peer-reviewed study to compile sea turtle bycatch data from gillnet, trawl and longline fisheries worldwide.

The study, which was published online April 6 in the journal Conservation Letters, analyzed data compiled from peer-reviewed papers, government reports, technical reports, and symposia proceedings published between 1990 and 2008. All data were based on direct onboard observations or interviews with fishermen. The study did not include data from recreational fishing.

Six of the world’s seven species of sea turtles are currently listed as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
“Direct onboard observations and interviews with fishermen indicate that about 85,000 turtles were caught between 1990 and 2008. But because these reports cover less than one percent of all fleets, with little or no information from small-scale fisheries around the world, we conservatively estimate that the true total is at least two orders of magnitude higher,” said Bryan Wallace, lead author of the new paper.
Wallace is the science advisor for the Sea Turtle Flagship Program at Conservation International and an adjunct assistant professor at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Most of his co-authors are researchers at Duke’s Center for Marine Conservation.
Their global data review revealed that the highest reported bycatch rates for longline fisheries occurred off Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, the highest rates for gillnet fishing took place in the North Adriatic region of the Mediterranean and the highest rates for trawls occurred off the coast of Uruguay.

When bycatch rates and amounts of observed fishing activity for all three gear types were combined and ranked across regions, four regions emerged as the overall most urgent conservation priorities: the East Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Southwest Atlantic, and the Northwest Atlantic.
“Although our numbers are estimates, they highlight clearly the importance of guidelines for fishing equipment and practices to help reduce these losses,” Wallace said.
Effective measures to reduce turtle bycatch include the use of circle hooks and fish bait in longline fisheries, and Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs) in trawling. Many of the most effective types of gear modifications, Wallace noted, have been developed by fishermen themselves.
Wallace said the Hawaiian longline fishery and the Australian prawn fishery have significantly reduced bycatch through close working relationships between fishermen and government managers, use of onboard observers, mandatory gear modifications and innovative technologies. TurtleWatch, a real-time database that provides daily updates on water temperatures and other conditions indicating where turtles might be found, has guided fishermen to avoid setting their gear in those areas.
Other approaches, such as the creation of marine protected areas and use of catch shares, also reduce bycatch, preserve marine biodiversity and promote healthy fish stocks in some cases, he said.
“Fisheries bycatch is the most acute threat to worldwide sea turtle populations today. Many animals die or are injured as a result of these interactions,” Wallace said. “But our message is that it’s not a lost cause. Managers and fishers have tools they can use to reduce bycatch, preserve marine biodiversity and promote healthy fish stocks, so that everyone wins, including turtles.”
The study stems from work Wallace began in 2005 as a postdoctoral research associate at the Duke University Marine Lab, where he helped develop the first global bycatch database for longline fisheries. That work was part of a three-year initiative called Project GloBAL (Global By-catch Assessment of Long-lived Species).
Co-authors on the new study – all of whom were part of the Project GloBAL team – are Rebecca L. Lewison of San Diego State University; Sara L. McDonald of Duke’s Center for Marine Conservation; Richard K. McDonald of the Center for Marine Conservation and the University of Richmond; Connie Y. Kot of the Center for Marine Conservation and the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment; and Shaleyla Kelez, Rhema K. Bjorkland, Elena M. Finkbeiner, S’rai Heimbrecht and Larry B. Crowder, all of the Center for Marine Conservation. Crowder is director of the center and the Stephen Toth Professor of Marine Biology at the Nicholas School. Lewison formerly was a research associate at the Duke Marine Lab.

By Timothy Lucas

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Sabertoothed Males Were Pussycats

Despite their fearsome fangs, male sabertoothed cats may have been less aggressive than many of their feline cousins, says a new study of male-female size differences in extinct big cats.

The researchers report that while male American lions were considerably larger than females, male and female sabertoothed cats were indistinguishable in size. The findings suggest that sabertooths may have been less aggressive than their fellow felines, researchers say.

In species where males fight for mates, bigger, heavier males have a better chance of winning fights, fending off their rivals and gaining access to females. After generations of male-male competition, the males of some species evolve to be much larger than their mates.

Most big cats have a form of sexual dimorphism where males are bigger than females, said co-author Julie Meachen-Samuels, a biologist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, NC. So she and Wendy Binder of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles wanted to know if extinct sabertooths and American lions showed the same size patterns as big cats living today.

CITATION: Meachen-Samuels, J. and W. Binder (2009). "Sexual Dimorphism and Ontogenetic Growth in the American Lion (Panthera atrox) and Sabertoothed Cat (Smilodon fatalis) from Rancho La Brea." Journal of Zoology.

When it comes to fossils, sorting males from females can be tricky. “It’s hard to tell who’s a male and who’s a female in the fossil record,” said Blaire Van Valkenburgh, a biologist at UCLA who has studied these animals extensively but was not an author on the paper. “Unless you’re lucky enough to get some DNA, or you’re working with an animal where males have horns and females don’t.”

For species that keep growing into adulthood, simply separating the fossils into two groups by size may not do the trick, either. “It’s easy to get a younger, smaller male confused with an older, larger female if you’re just dividing them by size,” Meachen-Samuels said.

The researchers accounted for continued growth using subtle clues from fossilized teeth. “Teeth fill in over time,” said Binder. “In young animals the tooth cavity is basically hollow, but as they get older it fills in with dentin. It won’t give you an exact age, but it can give you a relative age in terms of young, middle aged or old,” Binder added.

Meachen-Samuels and Binder x-rayed the lower teeth and jaws of 13 American lions and 19 sabertoothed cats recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. To account for growth over time, they measured tooth cavity diameter and plotted it against jaw length for each species. Plotted this way, the data for the American lion fell easily into two groups, regardless of age. The researchers concluded that "the little ones were females and the big ones were males,” said Van Valkenburgh.

In contrast, sabertoothed cat sizes seemed to be governed solely by age. It would appear that the males were indistinguishable from their mates. “Even by incorporating a measure of age, you can’t distinguish males and females,” said Meachen-Samuels.

Size differences between the sexes tend to be more impressive in species where male aggression is more intense, and in the extinct American lion, size differences between the sexes were even more dramatic than in lions living today.

The closest living relative of the American lion, "African lions engage in aggressive takeovers where one to several males will take over an entire pride – the males have battles to the death,” said Van Valkenburgh.

“Living lions have huge sexual dimorphism,” said Meachen-Samuels.

Based on their findings, the researchers think the American lion probably lived in male-dominated groups, where 1-2 males monopolized and mated with multiple females. “My guess would be that the American lion was similar to African lions, where males guard groups of females,” said Meachen-Samuels.

“But we don’t see that in the sabertoothed cat,” Binder said. The size similarity in sabertoothed cats suggests that male sabertooths may have been less aggressive than their larger cousins. “Rather than males having harems of females, the males and females in a group might have been more equal,” Binder said.

By Robin Smith

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Bird Songs Change With The Landscape

When the going gets rough, the tough apparently sing slower.

As vegetation reclaimed formerly cleared land in California, Oregon and Washington over the last 35 years, male white-crowned sparrows have lowered their pitch and slowed down their singing so that their love songs would carry better through heavier foliage.

"This is the first time that anyone has shown that bird songs can shift with rapid changes in habitat," says biologist Elizabeth Derryberry who made the finding as part of her dissertation research at Duke University.

She compared recordings of individual birds in 15 different areas with some nearly forgotten recordings made at the same spots in the 1970s by a California Academy of Sciences researcher, and found that the musical pitch and speed of the trill portion of the sparrows' short songs had dropped considerably. "I was really surprised to find that songs had changed in a similar way in so many different populations."

She then used archival aerial photography to see how the foliage had changed in a subset of those spots, and found that the one population whose song hadn't slowed down lived in an area where the foliage hadn't changed either.

The physics is clear, but the biology is a little less certain. A lower, slower song suffers less reverberation in denser foliage and will be heard more accurately. In turn, that means it is more likely to be copied by young males who are choosing which song they will learn. Over generations, that should cause the song to slow down and drop in pitch as the foliage changes.

In the short term however, Derryberry doesn't know whether the clearer song wins better territories or mates, although she does know that these changes in song do affect both male and female behavior.

The results add to a growing body of evidence that the acoustic and visual communications of animals change with their habitat. "Given how much the world's habitats are changing, this is sort of an unexpected but useful factor to monitor," Derryberry said. She's now testing the broader effects of ecology on song evolution in birds across areas of South America where habitat may be changing due to deforestation and global warming.

Derryberry, who earlier discovered that female white-crowned sparrows preferred the slower new songs to the chirpy old ones, is now a researcher at Louisiana State University. Her latest findings appear in the July edition of American Naturalist.

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Navy Grant to Fund Probe of Squid and Octopus Camouflage

Octopuses and squid are big brained species that use much of their mental powers to adjust their own appearances. This remarkable ability to camouflage on the fly has inspired the Office of Naval Research to award $7.5 million to Duke University and two collaborating institutions to learn more about how the animals do it.

Participating researchers plan to build an underwater version of the fictional "Star Trek" virtual reality "holodeck." They will also go out on expeditions both to collect animals for study and to document their surroundings in unprecedented detail. They will even take their investigations down to the molecular level where the skin can change its own optical properties.

"We need to know how the different animals we're going to look at actually see the world," said Sonke Johnsen, the Duke associate professor of biology who is principal investigator for this five-year Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) study. "What is the nature of their vision? How sharp is it, how quick does it respond to changes, and can they see colors?

"Especially at the surface, where waves are moving and water quality is changing and the sun's positions are shifting, we need to measure how light fields around them change. We also want to see how they behave and change in different environments. That's where the holodeck will come in."

The cubical holodeck will be built by engineer and research oceanographer Jules Jaffe, one of two participating researchers at the University of California at San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The aquarium-like chamber will be big enough to enclose the largest animals studied. Its walls will enable Duke and Scripps researchers to duplicate the changeable hues, lighting and optical conditions of the open ocean.

Cephalopods, the hundreds of different species classified as either octopuses or squids, are known to self-adjust skin colors and patterns in their effort to remain unnoticeable to predators or prey. Some can respond to the kinds of polarizing effects that humans need special sunglasses to discern. Some bioluminescent species even emit their own light, which they use to eliminate shadows that would give away their silhouettes.

"We will be able to change the colors, resolution, speed and everything else so that we can step inside their visual world under laboratory conditions," Johnsen said. "We will be able to show them natural scenes, but then also scenes that have been altered in different ways. The holodeck will be like a virtual reality machine for the ocean. In the world of marine biology we know of no other like it."

The other collaborator at Scripps will be Dariusz Stramski, a professor of oceanography who is a world expert on measuring rapidly changing light fields.

At the University of California at Santa Barbara, post-doctoral fellow Alison Sweeney, a former graduate student of Johnsen, will work with Daniel Morse, a professor of molecular genetics and biochemistry, to study proteins that can alter the animals' coloration. These pigments "can self-assemble and disassemble, more or less under the control of their nervous systems," Johnsen said. "And then those control how the animals look."

Meanwhile, a separate MURI led by the University of Texas at Austin will work toward goals so similar that some participants will be going on each other's research trips. In the case of the Duke-led group, that involves expeditions to islands off California and work on the Pacific island of Palau. The Texas group will head to the Florida Keys and the Gulf of Mexico. Collectively, the two efforts will receive about $15 million, Johnsen added.

So why is the military interested? "Obviously, you can think that camouflage is a good thing to have," Johnsen said. "You would like to be able to hide. But the work we do is at a basic, fundamental level. We won't do it with a particular application in mind. The military for ages has funded fairly basic research."

A second MURI award announced May 8 also has a Duke scientist as its principal investigator. Electrical and computer engineering professor David R. Smith is leading a study on "transformation optical metamaterials" funded by the U.S, Army Research Office. Smith's group works on "metamaterials" that can bend light to make an object appear invisible.

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Animal Families With The Most Diversity Also Have Widest Range Of Size

Somewhere out there in the ocean, SpongeBob SquarePants has a teeny-tiny cousin and a humongous uncle.

That's just what one would expect from a new analysis of body sizes across all orders of animal life that was conducted by researchers at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), in Durham, N.C. and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Researchers Craig McClain and Alison Boyer created a giant database on body sizes across all orders of animal life and found that phyla -- families of animals grouped together by a similar body plan -- with the greatest diversity of species were also those with the largest range of body sizes.

The sponges, Poriferans, were found to have some of the greatest diversity of both body size and species, ranging from microscopic to the size of an automobile. Molluscs (snails, squid, clams, chitons), and Arthropods (crabs, insects, lobsters, copepods) also showed great diversity. So did our family, the Chordates, which ranges from a half-inch fish in the swamps of Borneo to the truly leviathan 100-ton Blue Whale, with all the fishes, birds and mammals in between.

On the one hand, it may seem obvious that diversity in size and diversity in species go together, acknowledges marine biologist McClain, assistant director of science at NESCent. But it also says something a little more subtle about how new species arise and adapt to all the available niches in the environment.

“This really comes down to understanding the diversity of life on Earth,” McClain said.

The group's findings appear online in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The research was conducted in part at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. NESCent is a National Science Foundation collaboration of Duke, UNC and N.C. State that is housed in buildings Duke leases.

The Blue Whale, incidentally, is the largest animal ever, but the Chordate group doesn't boast the smallest. That distinction belongs to animals with names like mud dragons, brush heads, jaw worms, stomach hair worms and water bears that are so small they live between individual grains of sediment in the ocean. But this smallest group's range doesn't reach up to the largest body size.

This is a pattern that repeated itself several times in the data, McClain said. There are apparently physical limits to the range of sizes that can work for some body plans. In worms, for example, it is impossible to slither along if the girth and weight become too large. (The largest worm, Riftia pachyptila, from deep-sea vents, doesn't move.)

Within the range of sizes that works for a given body plan, evolution creates new species and new sizes, McClain said. What this sweeping analysis hasn't solved is the riddle about how different body sizes emerge. One theory says that body sizes arise through random natural variation. A second says that size diversity is driven by the availability of unused niches in the environment.

The finding also points to areas where more species might be waiting to be discovered. For example, the little-studied priapulid worms (aka “penis worms”) have only 16 species on the books, but with a very large range in size. McClain's guess is that there may be more undiscovered species within that range of sizes. “There are groups that definitely don't have a lot of people studying them,” he said.

Knowing something about a body plan's size constraints also might allow for a ballpark estimate of its number of species, McClain said.

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Dogs Chase Efficiently, but Cats Skulk Counterintuitively

A Duke University study suggests that evolution can behave as differently as dogs and cats. While the dogs depend on an energy-efficient style of four-footed running over long distances to catch their prey, cats seem to have evolved a profoundly inefficient gait, tailor-made to creep up on a mouse or bird in slow motion.

"It is usually assumed that efficiency is what matters in evolution," said Daniel Schmitt, a Duke associate professor of evolutionary anthropology. "We've found that's too simple a way of looking at evolution, because there are some animals that need to operate at high energy cost and low efficiency."

Namely cats.

In a report published online Nov. 26 in the research journal Public Library of Science (PLoS), Schmitt and two former Duke co-researchers followed up on a scientific hunch by measuring and videotaping how six housecats moved along a 6 yard-long runway in pursuit of food treats or feline toys.

Long-distance chase predators like dogs can reduce their muscular work needed to move forward by as much as 70 percent by allowing their body to rise and fall and exchanging potential and kinetic energy with each step. In contrast, the maximum for cats is about 37 percent and much lower than that in a stalking posture, the report found.

"An important implication of these results is the possibility of a tradeoff between stealthy walking and economy of locomotion," the three researchers wrote in PLoS. "These data show a previously unrecognized mechanical relationship in which crouched postures are associated with changes in footfall pattern, which are in turn related to reduced mechanical energy recovery."

In other words, they found that when cats slink close to the ground they walk in a way that "the movements of their front and back ends cancel each other out," Schmitt said. While that's not good for energy efficiency "the total movement of their bodies is going to be even and they'll be flowing along," he added

"If they're creeping, they're going to put this foot down, and then that foot down and then that one in an even fashion. We think it has to do with stability and caution, Schmitt said."

Walking humans recover as much energy as dogs, said Schmitt, who studies gaits of various mammals. "Our centers of mass rise and fall when we walk. And when we do that, humans and other animals exchange potential and kinetic energy. It's an evolutionary miracle in my view.

"But cats need to creep up on their prey. Most scientists think that energetic efficiency is the currency of natural selection. Here we've shown that some animals make compromises when they have to choose between competing demands."

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation. Kristin Bishop, a former postdoctoral researcher at Duke, was the lead researcher and first author. Another author was Anita Pai, a former Duke undergraduate who is now a medical student at Vanderbilt University.


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Birth Announcement of a Rare Aye-Aye at Duke

AAG Note: This little guy is so cute we couldn't resist adding him to our animal news-- even if he does live in North Carolina! The Duke article is a fascinating introduction to the world of lemurs. Enjoy.

Ardrey and Merlin, rare, nocturnal aye-ayes from Madagascar, are pleased to announce the birth of their second child, a male, early on July 23 at the Duke Lemur Center.

Ichabod weighed 116 grams at birth, and has greenish-yellow eyes, black and gray hair, and extraordinarily large ears.

Head primate technician Samantha Trull, who cares for the aye-ayes daily, said the newest addition is one of the most vocal aye-ayes she has ever heard.

He is the second captive-bred baby for the couple, and only the third aye-aye born to captive-bred parents. Aye-ayes (EYE-EYEs) are critically endangered in their native island of Madagascar. The animals are kept at the Duke Lemur Center in Durham for conservation and research.

Aye-ayes use their bat-like ears and finger tapping to detect grubs hidden beneath tree bark. They can use beaver-like teeth to gnaw into the wood to expose the grubs or fish them out with spidery fingers ending in hooked nails.

Today, aye-ayes are extremely rare even on Madagascar both because of deforestation and because local superstition holds that if an aye-aye points a finger at a person, that person is doomed. The gentle animals are sometimes killed on sight.

The Lemur Center brought aye-ayes into captivity more than two decades ago and was the site of the first captive aye-aye birth -- Blue Devil, born in 1993.

Before the birth of this latest male and his older sister, all aye-ayes at the center had been born of fathers socialized in the wild, where they apparently learned the art of mating.

Ichabod's father, Merlin, had to be coached patiently by Lemur Center assistant director Dean Gibson for more than two years before he got the hang of mating. Although captive born herself, Ardrey had learned her role by breeding with a wild male.

“Merlin was scared to death of her, didn’t know what to do,” Gibson said. Instead of sniffing and mating as he was supposed to, Merlin would sniff and run away, apparently unsure what to do next. Ardrey would take annoyed swipes at the reluctant suitor.

“It took two years of catching her in her breeding cycle, putting Merlin with her every day during her cycle, coaching him along and stopping her from being aggressive toward him,” Gibson recalled. “I’d stand there with a net and defend him, and when he was doing well, give him nuts."

“Also, I’d give her treats to calm her down so she’d sit there and eat, rather than attack him,” she said. Eventually, Gibson’s coaching was successful, and the animals bred. In 2006, a female named Angelique was the result.

The experience with the aye-ayes has taught the center’s primatologists an invaluable lesson -- that the complex creatures need socialization to mate, Gibson said.

According to center director Anne Yoder, the animals’ need for socialization is driving design of planned new housing at the center.

”We need to build facilities so that these animals can live in the social structure required for their natural reproductive behaviors to emerge and continue,” Yoder said. “Otherwise, we might find ourselves housing the last aye-aye, or the last examples of other endangered lemurs.”

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Little Teeth Suggest Big Jump in Primate Timeline

AAAG Note: Pretty cool find. Thought you'd be interested in this story from Duke University.

Tiny fossilized teeth excavated from an Indian open-pit coal mine could be the oldest Asian remains ever found of anthropoids, the primate lineage of today's monkeys, apes and humans, say researchers from Duke University and the Indian Institute of Technology.

Just 9-thousandths of a square inch in size, the teeth are about 54.5 million years old and suggest these early primates were no larger than modern dwarf lemurs weighing about 2 to 3 ounces. Studies of the shape of the teeth suggest these small animals could live on a fruit and insect diet, according to the researchers.

"It's certainly the oldest anthropoid from Asia and India," said Richard Kay, a Duke professor of evolutionary anthropology who is corresponding author of a report to be published online during the week of Aug. 4-8 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Previous fossil evidence shows primates were living in North America, Europe and Asia at least 55 million years ago. But, until now, the fossil record of anthropoid primates has extended back only 45 million years.

"We're going back almost 10 million years before any previously described Asian anthropoid," said co-author Blythe Williams, a Duke visiting associate professor of evolutionary anthropology. "The new fossils from India are exciting because they show that the anthropoid lineage is much more ancient than we realized."

In addition to stretching the primate timeline, the specimens represent a new genus as well as a new species of anthropoid, which the researchers have named Anthrasimias gujaratensis by drawing from the Greek word for "coal," Latin for "monkey" and the Indian State of Gujarat where the teeth were found.

"Anthrasimias may be the oldest anthropoid in the world," the PNAS report said -- "may" reflecting the fact that some scientists think slightly older fossils found in a Moroccan limestone deposit also could have been anthropoid, Kay said.

The report's first author is Sunil Bajpai, an earth scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology who directed excavations at the Vastan lignite coal mine in western India that unearthed the fossils.

Bajpai's Indian team managed to find and remove the tiny Anthrasimias tooth specimens from a strata in the mine while "really gigantic trucks" scooped up coal above them, Kay said. The teeth were dated by identifying microscopic marine plankton fossils of known age in nearby rock layers, he added.

Bajpai's team was funded by India's Department of Science and Technology. Work by Williams and Kay, who are anthropoid experts, was funded the Duke Provost's Research Fund and the National Science Foundation.

Their PNAS report describes tooth structure differences that would separate Anthrasimias from two other ancient lines of primates whose remains have been found at the same level of the Vastan mine. Of the three lines, Williams and Kay believe only Anthrasimias's is part of the anthropoid lineage that evolved into modern monkeys, apes and humans.

"Most of the fossil record of ancient primates is made up of teeth, because teeth are easy to preserve and hard," Williams said. "Occasionally we get lucky enough to have a skull to work with, but in this case a few teeth is all we have." Their PNAS report described two upper molars and one lower molar.

"From the tooth size and structure we can say something about the animals' body weight and diet, because teeth have crests that are differentially developed depending on whether they ate primarily insects, leaves or fruit," he said. But without more body parts, Kay and Williams declined to deduce what the animals looked like.

Other authors of the PNAS report were Debasis Das of the Indian Institute of Technology, Vivesh Kapur of Chandigarh, India, and B.N. Tiwari of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in India.

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Anthropologists Examine Relatives and Friends, Seeking Both Sides of our Nature

To find out what makes us human, Brian Hare asks our closest relatives and best friends.

As a new and newsworthy assistant professor of biological anthropology and anatomy at Duke, he’s examining the social abilities of chimpanzees and bonobos, the two endangered species of ape with which we share about 99 percent of our genes.

This summer, the focus is on “xenophobia” (ZEE-no-phobia), the fear of strangers.

Bonobos “are extremely tolerant,” Hare says. “They’re very good at cooperating and much more egalitarian, like we are. Chimpanzees are a lot more hostile. They have a lot of problems. They can even kill each other.”

“What a fantastic opportunity! Here we have hallmarks of being human, and they differ between our two closest relatives.”

With his wife, scientist/journalist/blogger Vanessa Woods, Hare is again going to Africa in mid-June as he has for the last four years to study chimps and bonobos in orphanages.

Bonobos are not pets. These animals were orphaned by poachers.They’ll start at Point-Noire in the Republic of Congo, where three graduate students are already hard at work evaluating the behavior and thought processes of a group of orphaned chimpanzees at the Tchimpounga sanctuary. Then they’ll fly to Brazzaville and boat across the Congo River to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There they will study a group of orphaned bonobos at the Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary.

This summer’s xenophobia testing will involve showing the apes photos of familiar and unfamiliar animals to see which they prefer looking at. “The prediction is that chimpanzees and bonobos will have different preferences,” Hare says. “Bonobos tend to be very peaceful with neighbors they don’t necessarily know very well. Chimpanzees do not.”

Meanwhile, Woods will continue evaluating “social-sexual behavior” among very young bonobos. Earlier research by Hare’s group and others documented that adult bonobos — unlike chimps — use simulated and real sexual activity to ward off tensions among group members. And Woods’ research has also found “2-and 3-year-old babies are already using these social-sexual behaviors.” Hare says. “The question is: does that require a lot of exposure to adults, or does it matter?”

The orphaned chimps and bonobos are the offspring of parents killed for food or trafficked as exotic pets. They’ve formed their own societies of primate peers at the three African wildlife sanctuaries where Hare has negotiated his group’s access to conduct research. At night the orphans can sleep in enclosures comfortably roofed-off from the rain. And by day they can “escape” from the gaze of human monitors within open, natural spaces of up to 100 acres filled with the plants they know.

“I want to see animals living in as rich an environment as possible, because I want to find out how they express their most sophisticated problem-solving abilities,” he says. “These are microcosms of what they would normally experience in the wild, but they’re up to 20 times larger than the world’s largest zoo facility. Not only that, they’re in primary tropical forests.” In such settings, the animals can develop normally despite being orphaned, he adds. “They show very few, if any, of the aberrant behaviors you see in laboratory animals.”

Hare does research with these subjects by their own invitation. “The idea is coming up with experiments that are fun for the animals, so they’ll volunteer to participate,” he says. “In the morning, we ask them if they would like to play games with us. If they’d like to play the games, then we’re doing our jobs well.” Doing such research on animals living in totally wild settings would be impossible as well as unethical, he adds.

Examples of fun and games include the “double rope” exercise in which animals are tested for their ability or inclination to work cooperatively by pulling on opposite ends of a rope connected to a food tray. Only by pulling together can they get a snack. The test highlights striking differences in the attitudes of chimps and bonobos, which split on our family tree about 2 million years ago. All in all, he has been working with apes for 14 years.

Bonobos play with the scientists only if they want to.Ingenious experiments on animal behavior have been Hare’s trademark since his undergraduate days at Emory University’s Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta. He first attracted attention there by taking up his professor’s challenge to prove that his family dogs could infer human thought in the way they followed a pointed finger to the correct Dixie cup where food was hidden.

“I found it interesting that dogs can do this but chimps can’t,” he recalls. “People think solving this pointing problem is also very important for young children as they develop the ability to think about the thoughts of others.”

Ironically, after graduating from Emory (summa cum laude) with anthropology and psychology degrees, Hare failed to be selected as a graduate student at Duke’s well-respected Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy. He ended up attending Harvard instead, which he calls “the Duke of the north for me.” At Harvard he expected to continue studying primates but found himself in Siberia evaluating an amazing breeding experiment that had “tamed” silver foxes.

By breeding only the animals that were least aggressive toward humans for 30 successive generations, scientists had turned them into “cute” foxes that behaved much like fawning retrievers. Hare’s experiments showed that they responded to human gestures — such as pointing — just like his dogs did back in Atlanta. Untamed silver foxes did not.

His Harvard advisor on the project – now a research colleague — thinks the same selection pressure is important in the evolution of the bonobos’ friendly behavior toward each other, says Hare.

Arriving at Duke this spring after making a name for himself as director of the Hominoid Psychology Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Hare will be doing some chimpanzee research at North Carolina’s state zoo in Asheboro while also rekindling his canine research.

About 800 square feet of space in the Bioscience Building’s basement has been renovated as “a lab for people to bring their pet dogs in to play some fun games,” says Hare, who also has an appointment at Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.

“We’ll be able to look at how dogs solve problems.” He explains. In the process, “we can also offer doggy day care.”

By Monte Basgall

Monte Basgall is senior science writer at Duke News and Communications.