With full captions explaining how each species act in a group, communicate, hunt and feed, and rear its young, Monkeys is a brilliant examination in 150 outstanding color photographs of these remarkable primates. As our closest relatives in the animal world, monkeys have always fascinated and amused humans in equal measure. Monkeys is an outstanding collection of photographs showing these complex, intelligent animals in their natural habitat. Arranged in chapters covering anatomy, family, behavior, feeding, and young, Monkeys features a wide variety of monkeys and apes, including baboons, gorillas, Orang Utans, macaques, howler monkeys, spider monkeys, marmosets, gibbons, mandrills, and chimpanzees. The smallest monkey is the pygmy marmoset, which can be just 4.6 inches in length with a 6.8-inch tail and weighing just over 3.5 oz., while the massive Grauer's gorilla can weigh over 400 lbs.
A 1985 amendment to the Animal Welfare Act requires those who keep nonhuman primates to develop and follow appropriate plans for promoting the animals' psychological well-being. The amendment, however, provides few specifics. The Psychological Well-Being of Nonhuman Primates recommends practical approaches to meeting those requirements. It focuses on what is known about the psychological needs of primates and makes suggestions for assessing and promoting their well-being. This volume examines the elements of an effective care programâ€"social companionship, opportunities for species-typical activity, housing and sanitation, and daily care routinesâ€"and provides a helpful checklist for designing a plan for promoting psychological well-being. The book provides a wealth of specific and useful information about the psychological attributes and needs of the most widely used and exhibited nonhuman primates. Readable and well-organized, it will be welcomed by animal care and use committees, facilities administrators, enforcement inspectors, animal advocates, researchers, veterinarians, and caretakers.
An introductory guide to all species and subspecies of gorilla, chimpanzee, orangutan and gibbon, which would also serve as an educational resource. It features preliminary sections that explain how the apes are related and provides information on biology, ecology, life history, behaviour and physiology.
Executive summary: Tourism is often proposed 1) as a strategy to fund conservation efforts to protect great apes and their habitats, 2) as a way for local communities to participate in, and benefit from, conservation activities on behalf of great apes, or 3) as a business. A few very successful sites point to the considerable potential of conservation-based great ape tourism, but it will not be possible to replicate this success everywhere. The number of significant risks to great apes that can arise from tourism reqire a cautious approach. If great ape tourism is not based on sound conservation principles right from the start, the odds are that economic objectives will take precedence, the consequences of which in all likelihood would be damaging to the well-being and eventual survival of the apes, and detrimental to the continued preservation of their habitat. All great ape species and subspecies are classified as Endangered or Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (IUCN 2010), therefore it is imperative that great ape tourism adhere to the best practice guidelines in this document. The guiding principles of best practice in great ape tourism are: Tourism is not a panacea for great ape conservation or revenue generation; Tourism can enhance long-term support for the conservation of great apes and their habitat; Conservation comes first--it must be the primary goal at any great ape site and tourism can be a tool to help fund it; Great ape tourism should only be developed if the anticipated conservation benefits, as identified in impact studies, significantly outweigh the risks; Enhanced conservation investment and action at great ape tourism sites must be sustained in perpetuity; Great ape tourism management must be based on sound and objective science; Benefits and profit for communities adjacent to great ape habitat should be maximised; Profit to private sector partners and others who earn income associated with tourism is also important, but should not be the driving force for great ape tourism development or expansion; Comprehensive understanding of potential impacts must guide tourism development. positive impacts from tourism must be maximised and negative impacts must be avoided or, if inevitable, better understood and mitigated. The ultimate success or failure of great ape tourism can lie in variables that may not be obvious to policymakers who base their decisions primarily on earning revenue for struggling conservation programmes. However, a number of biological, geographical, economic and global factors can affect a site so as to render ape tourism ill-advised or unsustainable. This can be due, for example, to the failure of the tourism market for a particular site to provide revenue sufficient to cover the development and operating costs, or it can result from failure to protect the target great apes from the large number of significant negative aspects inherent in tourism. Either of these failures will have serious consequences for the great ape population. Once apes are habituated to human observers, they are at increased risk from poaching and other forms of conflict with humans. They must be protected in perpetuity even if tourism fails or ceases for any reason. Great ape tourism should not be developed without conducting critical feasibility analyses to ensure there is sufficient potential for success. Strict attention must be paid to the design of the enterprise, its implementation and continual management capacity in a manner that avoids, or at least minimises, the negative impacts of tourism on local communities and on the apes themselves. Monitoring programmes to track costs and impacts, as well as benefits, [is] essential to inform management on how to optimise tourism for conservation benefits. These guidelines have been developed for both existing and potential great ape tourism sites that wish to improve the degree to which their programme constributes to the conservation rather than the exploitation of great apes.
Planet Without Apes demands that we consider whether we can live with the consequences of wiping our closest relatives off the face of the Earth. Leading primatologist Craig Stanford warns that extinction of the great apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans—threatens to become a reality within just a few human generations. We are on the verge of losing the last links to our evolutionary past, and to all the biological knowledge about ourselves that would die along with them. The crisis we face is tantamount to standing aside while our last extended family members vanish from the planet. Stanford sees great apes as not only intelligent but also possessed of a culture: both toolmakers and social beings capable of passing cultural knowledge down through generations. Compelled by his field research to take up the cause of conservation, he is unequivocal about where responsibility for extinction of these species lies. Our extermination campaign against the great apes has been as brutal as the genocide we have long practiced on one another. Stanford shows how complicity is shared by people far removed from apes’ shrinking habitats. We learn about extinction’s complex links with cell phones, European meat eaters, and ecotourism, along with the effects of Ebola virus, poverty, and political instability. Even the most environmentally concerned observers are unaware of many specific threats faced by great apes. Stanford fills us in, and then tells us how we can redirect the course of an otherwise bleak future.
The great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans) are our closest living relatives, sharing a common ancestor only five million years ago. We also share key features such as high intelligence, omnivorous diets, prolonged child-rearing and rich social lives. The great apes show a surprising diversity of adaptations, particularly in social life, ranging from the solitary life of orangutans, through patriarchy in gorillas to complex but different social organisations in bonobos and chimpanzees. As great apes are so close to humans, comparisons yield essential knowledge for modelling human evolutionary origins. Great Ape Societies provides comprehensive up-to-date syntheses of work on all four species, drawing on decades of international field work, zoo and laboratory studies. It will be essential reading for students and researchers in primatology, anthropology, psychology and human evolution.
This comprehensive and authoritative review of the distribution and conservation status of Great Apes includes individual country profiles for each species and overview chapters on ape biology, ecology, and conservation challenges.
Annotation As Jane Goodall never fails to mention, "bush meat is the greatest conservation crisis in my lifetime." This book documents in text and photographs how wild animals in the Congo Basin, particularly the Great Apes but also chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, are slaughtered and used for human consumption.
What do we think about when we think about human evolution? With his characteristic wit and wisdom, anthropologist Jonathan Marks explores our scientific narrative of human origins—the study of evolution—and examines its cultural elements and theoretical foundations. In the process, he situates human evolution within a general anthropological framework and presents it as a special case of kinship and mythology. Tales of the Ex-Apes argues that human evolution has incorporated the emergence of social relations and cultural histories that are unprecedented in the apes and thus cannot be reduced to purely biological properties and processes. Marks shows that human evolution has involved the transformation from biological to biocultural evolution. Over tens of thousands of years, new social roles—notably spouse, father, in-laws, and grandparents—have co-evolved with new technologies and symbolic meanings to produce the human species, in the absence of significant biological evolution. We are biocultural creatures, Marks argues, fully comprehensible by recourse to neither our real ape ancestry nor our imaginary cultureless biology.
