Getting Humans Off Monkeys' Backs: Using Primate Acclimation as a Guide for Habitat Management Efforts.

Wild primates face grave conservation challenges, with habitat loss and climate change projected to cause mass extinctions in the coming decades. As large-bodied Neotropical primates, mantled howling monkeys (Alouatta palliata) are predicted to fare poorly under climate change, yet are also known for their resilience in a variety of environments, including highly disturbed habitats. We utilized ecophysiology research on this species to determine the morphological, physiological, and behavioral mechanisms howlers employ to overcome ecological challenges. Our data show that howlers at La Pacifica, Costa Rica are capable of modifying body size. Howlers displayed reduced mass in warmer, drier habitats, seasonal weight changes, frequent within-lifetime weight fluctuations, and gradual increases in body mass over the past four decades. These within-lifetime changes indicate a capacity to modify morphology in a way that can impact animals' energetics and thermodynamics. Howlers are also able to consume foods with a wide variety of food material properties by altering oral processing during feeding. While this capability suggests some capacity to cope with the phenological shifts expected from climate change and increased habitat fragmentation, data on rates of dental microwear warn that these acclimations may also cost dental longevity. Lastly, we found that howlers are able to acclimate to changing thermal pressures. On shorter-term daily scales, howlers use behavioral mechanisms to thermoregulate, including timing activities to avoid heat stress and utilizing cool microhabitats. At the seasonal scale, animals employ hormonal pathways to influence heat production. These lines of evidence cumulatively indicate that howlers possess morphological, physiological, and behavioral mechanisms to acclimate to environmental challenges. As such, howlers' plasticity may facilitate their resilience to climate change and habitat loss. While habitat loss in the tropics is unlikely to abate, our results point to a potential benefit of active management and selective cultivation to yield large, interconnected forest fragments with targeted phenology that provides both a complex physical structure and a diversity of food sources. These steps could assist howlers in using their natural acclimation potential to survive future conservation threats.

A molar microwear texture analysis of pitheciid primates.

Dental microwear textures have been examined for a broad range of extant primates to assess their efficacy for reconstructing diets of fossil species. To date though, no dental microwear texture data have been published for pitheciid molars, despite reported variation in degree of sclerocarpy and, by extension, the fracture properties of foods these platyrrhines eat. While all pitheciids eat hard or tough seeds, Chiropotes and Pithecia have been documented to consume more than Callicebus. In this study, we explored whether measures of molar microwear texture complexity discriminate taxa following variation in reliance upon seeds, and whether dispersion among variables is greatest in Callicebus, which has the most variable diet. Here we report results for a study of microwear textures on M2 "Phase II" facets of Ch. satanas (N = 14), P. irrorata (N = 8), and Ca. moloch (N = 24) from the Brazilian Amazon (Oriximina, UHE Samuel, and Taperinha, respectively). Textures examined using a scanning confocal profiler showed significant differences in central tendencies for three measures: mean dale area (Sda), anisotropy (Str), and heterogeneity (HAsfc9 ). Ten measures showed significant differences in dispersion, with Callicebus being significantly more variable in eight of those ten. These results demonstrate that the pitheciids with different morphological adaptations and dietary reliance on seeds differ in their dental microwear textures, though less than initially hypothesized. Measures of dispersion, especially, show potential for identifying dietary variability.

Canine and incisor microwear in pitheciids and Ateles reflects documented patterns of tooth use.

OBJECTIVES: Platyrrhine species differ in the extent to and the manner in which they use their incisors and canines during food ingestion. For example, Ateles uses its anterior teeth to process mechanically nondemanding soft fruits, while the sclerocarp-harvesting pitheciids rely extensively on these teeth to acquire and process more demanding foods. Pitheciids themselves vary in anterior tooth use, with the pitheciines (Cacajao, Chiropotes, and Pithecia) noted to use their robust canines in a variety of ways to predate seeds, while Callicebus, which rarely predates seeds, uses its incisors and exceptionally short canines to scrape tough mesocarp from fruits. To investigate the relationship between tooth use and dental wear, microwear textures were investigated for the anterior teeth of these five genera of platyrrhine primates. METHODS: Using a white light confocal microscope, 12 microwear texture attributes that reflect feature size, anisotropy, density, and complexity were recorded from high-resolution epoxy casts of the incisors and canines of adult wild-collected Brazilian specimens of Ateles, Callicebus, Cacajao, Chiropotes, and Pithecia. RESULTS: Pitheciine canines tend to have deep microwear features and complex, anisotropic microwear textures, while Ateles anterior teeth tend to have very small features, low feature density, and less complex and anisotropic surfaces. Callicebus incisor and canine microwear is generally intermediate in size and complexity between those extremes. CONCLUSIONS: These findings align with expectations from reported field observations of tooth use and illustrate the potential for using microwear texture analysis to infer patterns of anterior tooth use in extinct primates. Am J Phys Anthropol 161:6-25, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Environmental perturbations can be detected through microwear texture analysis in two platyrrhine species from Brazilian Amazonia.

Recent dental microwear studies have shown that fossil species differ from one another in texture attributes-both in terms of central tendency and dispersion. Most comparative studies used to interpret these results have relied on poorly provenienced museum samples that are not well-suited to consideration of within species variation in diet. Here we present a study of two species of platyrrhine monkeys, Alouatta belzebul (n = 60) and Sapajus apella (n = 28) from Pará State in the Brazilian Amazon in order to assess effects of habitat variation on microwear (each species was sampled from forests that differ in the degree of disturbance from highly disturbed to minimally disturbed). Results indicate that microwear texture values vary between habitats-more for the capuchins than the howler monkeys. This is consistent with the notion that diets of the more folivorous A. belzebul are less affected by habitat disturbance than those of the more frugivorous S. apella. It also suggests that microwear holds the potential to reflect comparatively subtle differences in within-species variation in fossil taxa if sample size and control over paleohabitat allow.

Dental topography and molar wear in Alouatta palliata from Costa Rica.

Paleoprimatologists depend on relationships between form and function of teeth to reconstruct the diets of fossil species. Most of this work has been limited to studies of unworn teeth. A new approach, dental topographic analysis, allows the characterization and comparison of worn primate teeth. Variably worn museum specimens have been used to construct species-specific wear sequences so that measurements can be compared by wear stage among taxa with known differences in diet. This assumes that individuals in a species tend to wear their molar teeth in similar ways, a supposition that has yet to be tested. Here we evaluate this assumption with a longitudinal study of changes in tooth form over time in primates. Fourteen individual mantled howling monkeys (Alouatta palliata) were captured and then recaptured after 2, 4, and 7 years when possible at Hacienda La Pacifica in Costa Rica between 1989-1999. Dental impressions were taken each time, and molar casts were produced and analyzed using dental topographic analysis. Results showed consistent decreases in crown slope and occlusal relief. In contrast, crown angularity, a measure of surface jaggedness, remained fairly constant except with extreme wear. There were no evident differences between specimens collected in different microhabitats. These results suggest that different individual mantled howling monkeys wear their teeth down in similar ways, evidently following a species-specific wear sequence. Dental topographic analysis may therefore be used to compare morphology among similarly worn individuals from different species.