SBE-UKRI: Form and function of primate natal coats

SBE-UKRI：灵长类动物出生皮毛的形式和功能

• 批准号: 2218421
• 负责人: James Higham
• 金额: $ 48.94万
• 依托单位: New York University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-11-01 至 2026-10-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2218421&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBE; UKRI; Form; function; primate

The color of infants in many primates stand out clearly against adult and background color. Why and how should the most vulnerable members of a group be so conspicuous to threats? This project investigates this question and offers insight into the role of infants in the social systems of primates. The research will create and curate a new publicly accessible standardized image database of primate species alongside life history, social and ecological data and results will contribute to our understanding of why some animals change color over their lifetimes. The project will train two postdoctoral researchers plus dozens of researchers globally, including many in primate native range countries, in objective photography for studying animal coloration. The project’s comprehensive education and outreach program provides education and training opportunities to students from kindergarten to graduate school with a focus on enhancing the representation, retention, and training of underrepresented minority scholars through existing institutional and professional association-affiliated programs. Many ideas for the function of infant conspicuousness in some species have been proposed but not rigorously investigated. These include warning potentially infanticidal out-group males or predators that the infant will be defended by the group, confusing the paternity of infants to prevent infanticide, helping caregivers keep track of the infant, and facilitating the care of infants by mothers and non-mothers. This project tests these hypotheses by objectively measuring the color of many individuals from many primate species throughout infancy, carrying out a comprehensive comparative analysis of infant coloration across species, along with behavioral experiments to measure how mothers, fathers and non-fathers respond to differently colored infants. Color is measured using calibrated and standardized digital photography at zoos, sanctuaries and research centers globally, with local researchers photographing infants throughout the period of development. These are then be processed using visual-system dependent methods to get a ‘receiver-eye-view’ of primate infant appearance for 250 individuals from 80 different primate species, and by experimentally manipulating the coloration of images to assess response by different adult members of the group. Comparative analyses across primate species test the predictions made by each of the functional hypotheses about how infant color should relate to species’ behavior, ecology, and social system. This project is funded jointly by Biological Anthropology (SBE) and Behavioral Systems Cluster (BIO).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

许多灵长类动物的婴儿颜色与成人和背景颜色相比，为什么以及如何应对一个群体中最脆弱的成员如此引人注目？这个项目调查了这个问题，并深入了解婴儿在社会系统中的作用。该研究将创建和管理一个新的可公开访问的灵长类动物物种图像数据库以及生活史、社会和生态数据，其结果将有助于我们理解为什么某些动物在其一生中会改变颜色。研究人员加上数十名研究人员该项目的综合教育和推广计划为从幼儿园到研究生院的学生提供教育和培训机会，重点是增强动物色彩的再现、保留和培训。少数族裔学者通过现有的机构和专业协会附属项目提出了许多关于婴儿引人注目的功能的想法，但没有经过严格的调查，其中包括警告潜在的杀婴外群雄性或掠食者，婴儿将受到保护。这该项目通过客观测量许多灵长类动物的许多个体的颜色来测试这些假设。婴儿期，对不同物种的婴儿肤色进行全面的比较分析，并进行行为实验，以测量母亲、父亲和非父亲对不同肤色婴儿的反应，在动物园、保护区使用经过校准和标准化的数码摄影来测量颜色。和全球研究中心，当地研究人员拍摄婴儿整个发育阶段的照片，然后使用依赖于视觉系统的方法进行处理，以获得来自 80 种不同灵长类物种的 250 只灵长类婴儿外观的“接收者眼睛视图”，并通过实验操纵图像的颜色来评估该群体中不同成年成员的反应，对每个灵长类物种的功能假设做出的预测进行测试，这些假设涉及婴儿颜色与物种的行为、生态、该项目由生物人类学 (SBE) 和行为系统集群 (BIO) 联合资助。该奖项是 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。