Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Introduction
Locomotion and posture are important elements of behavioral ecology. Since primates are mobile and most are arboreal, knowing where, why, and how they position themselves in the forest canopy provides a better understanding of many aspects of primate life. Establishing predictive relationships between positional behavior and additional aspects of primate biology not only helps explain the behavior of living animals, but also allows us to infer the behavior of fossil taxa more reliably. Although there have been many studies of one or a few species at single sites, studies of positional behavior of whole (or nearly whole) primate communities are rare. Notable exceptions include the landmark study of Fleagle and Mittermeier (1980) on monkeys in Surinam and the study by Gebo and Chapman (1995a, 1995b) on monkeys in Uganda's Kibale Forest. In an effort to add to the body of comparative data, I began studies on the positional behavior of seven Taï Forest monkeys in 1993. The first study of Taï monkeys by Galat and Galat-Luong (1985) contained basic data on habitat use, however these authors were not primarily concerned with positional behavior.
The monkeys at Taï provide a potentially stringent test of what determines – or at least co-varies with – locomotion and posture. Unlike the Surinam monkeys studied by Fleagle and Mittermeier (1980), the Taï cercopithecids do not represent a great diversity of locomotor adaptations or as great a range of body size (Schultz 1970, Oates et al. 1990, Fleagle 1999).
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge-org.demo.remotlog.com is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.