Scholars@Duke
Charles L Nunn

Charles L Nunn

Gosnell Family Professor in Global Health
Evolutionary Anthropology

Selected Publications

Disentangling social, environmental, and zoonotic transmission pathways of a gastrointestinal protozoan (Blastocystis spp.) in northeast Madagascar.

Journal Article American journal of biological anthropology · November 2024 ObjectivesUnderstanding disease transmission is a fundamental challenge in ecology. We used transmission potential networks to investigate whether a gastrointestinal protozoan (Blastocystis spp.) is spread through social, environmental, and/or zoo ... Full text Cite

Infectious disease responses to human climate change adaptations.

Journal Article Global change biology · August 2024 Many recent studies have examined the impact of predicted changes in temperature and precipitation patterns on infectious diseases under different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. But these emissions scenarios symbolize more than altered temperature and ... Full text Cite

Astroviruses in terrestrial Malagasy mammals.

Journal Article PLoS neglected tropical diseases · June 2024 Small terrestrial mammals are major hosts of infectious agents responsible for zoonotic diseases. Astroviruses (AstVs)-the cause of non-bacterial gastroenteritis mainly affecting young children-have been detected in a wide array of mammalian and avian host ... Full text Cite

How market integration impacts human disease ecology.

Journal Article Evolution, medicine, and public health · January 2024 Market integration (MI), or the shift from subsistence to market-based livelihoods, profoundly influences health, yet its impacts on infectious diseases remain underexplored. Here, we synthesize the current understanding of MI and infectious disease to sti ... Full text Cite

Effect of habitat degradation on hantavirus infection among introduced and endemic small mammals of Madagascar.

Journal Article bioRxiv · December 24, 2023 Hantaviruses are globally distributed zoonotic pathogens capable of causing fatal disease in humans. Rodents and other small mammals are the typical reservoirs of hantaviruses, though the particular host varies regionally. Addressing the risk of hantavirus ... Full text Link to item Cite

Using phylogeographic link-prediction in primates to prioritize human parasite screening.

Journal Article American journal of biological anthropology · December 2023 ObjectivesThe ongoing risk of emerging infectious disease has renewed calls for understanding the origins of zoonoses and identifying future zoonotic disease threats. Given their close phylogenetic relatedness and geographic overlap with humans, n ... Full text Cite

A New Paradigm for Pandemic Preparedness.

Journal Article Curr Epidemiol Rep · December 2023 PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Preparing for pandemics requires a degree of interdisciplinary work that is challenging under the current paradigm. This review summarizes the challenges faced by the field of pandemic science and proposes how to address them. RECENT FIN ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Sociodemographic Variables Can Guide Prioritized Testing Strategies for Epidemic Control in Resource-Limited Contexts.

Journal Article The Journal of infectious diseases · November 2023 BackgroundTargeted surveillance allows public health authorities to implement testing and isolation strategies when diagnostic resources are limited, and can be implemented via the consideration of social network topologies. However, it remains un ... Full text Cite

Explaining the primate extinction crisis: predictors of extinction risk and active threats.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · September 2023 Explaining why some species are disproportionately impacted by the extinction crisis is of critical importance for conservation biology as a science and for proactively protecting species that are likely to become threatened in the future. Using the most c ... Full text Cite

Predicting primate-parasite associations using exponential random graph models.

Journal Article The Journal of animal ecology · March 2023 Ecological associations between hosts and parasites are influenced by host exposure and susceptibility to parasites, and by parasite traits, such as transmission mode. Advances in network analysis allow us to answer questions about the causes and consequen ... Full text Cite

COVID-19 and Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health.

Journal Article Evolution, medicine, and public health · January 2023 Full text Cite

Ecosystem change, market participation, and human health in villages proximate to Parc National de Marojejy.

Journal Article Malagasy Nature · 2023 Human activities, including agricultural practices, have marked impacts on ecosystems that can affect food security, health, and livelihoods. These changes can affect human health by increasing infectious disease transmission between humans and animals. Fu ... Open Access Link to item Cite

Comparing transmission potential networks based on social network surveys, close contacts and environmental overlap in rural Madagascar.

Journal Article Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · January 2022 Social and spatial network analysis is an important approach for investigating infectious disease transmission, especially for pathogens transmitted directly between individuals or via environmental reservoirs. Given the diversity of ways to construct netw ... Full text Open Access Cite

Primate malarias as a model for cross-species parasite transmission.

Journal Article eLife · January 2022 Parasites regularly switch into new host species, representing a disease burden and conservation risk to the hosts. The distribution of these parasites also gives insight into characteristics of ecological networks and genetic mechanisms of host-parasite i ... Full text Open Access Cite

Technological infrastructure, sleep, and rest-activity patterns in a Kaqchikel Maya community.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2022 Sleep duration, quality, and rest-activity pattern-a measure for inferring circadian rhythm-are influenced by multiple factors including access to electricity. Recent findings suggest that the safety and comfort afforded by technology may improve sleep but ... Full text Cite

Predictions of primate-parasite coextinction.

Journal Article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · November 2021 Future biodiversity loss threatens the integrity of complex ecological associations, including among hosts and parasites. Almost half of primate species are threatened with extinction, and the loss of threatened hosts could negatively impact parasite assoc ... Full text Open Access Cite

Gibbon sleep quantified: the influence of lunar phase and meteorological variables on activity in Hylobates moloch and Hylobates pileatus.

Journal Article Primates; journal of primatology · September 2021 Sleep in the primate order remains understudied, with quantitative estimates of sleep duration available for less than 10% of primate species. Even fewer species have had their sleep synchronously quantified with meteorological data, which have been shown ... Full text Cite

Mitigating Future Respiratory Virus Pandemics: New Threats and Approaches to Consider.

Journal Article Viruses · April 2021 Despite many recent efforts to predict and control emerging infectious disease threats to humans, we failed to anticipate the zoonotic viruses which led to pandemics in 2009 and 2020. The morbidity, mortality, and economic costs of these pandemics have bee ... Full text Cite

Epidemiological transitions in human evolution and the richness of viruses, helminths, and protozoa.

Journal Article Evolution, medicine, and public health · January 2021 Background and objectivesIn absolute terms, humans are extremely highly parasitized compared to other primates. This may reflect that humans are outliers in traits correlated with parasite richness: population density, geographic range area, and s ... Full text Cite

One health disparities and COVID-19.

Journal Article Evolution, medicine, and public health · January 2021 The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected some communities and populations more than others. We propose that an interdisciplinary framework of 'One Health Disparities' advances understanding of the social and systemic issue ... Full text Cite

Food insecurity related to agricultural practices and household characteristics in rural communities of northeast Madagascar.

Journal Article Food security · January 2021 Ending hunger and alleviating poverty are key goals for a sustainable future. Food security is a constant challenge for agrarian communities in low-income countries, especially in Madagascar. We investigated agricultural practices, household characteristic ... Full text Open Access Cite

Effects of host extinction and vector preferences on vector-borne disease risk in phylogenetically structured host-hector communities.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2021 Anthropogenic disturbance impacts the phylogenetic composition and diversity of ecological communities. While changes in diversity are known to dramatically change species interactions and alter disease dynamics, the effects of phylogenetic changes in host ... Full text Cite

Enriched sleep environments lengthen lemur sleep duration.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2021 Characteristics of the sleep-site are thought to influence the quality and duration of primate sleep, yet only a handful of studies have investigated these links experimentally. Using actigraphy and infrared videography, we quantified sleep in four lemur s ... Full text Cite

Effects of land use, habitat characteristics, and small mammal community composition on Leptospira prevalence in northeast Madagascar.

Journal Article PLoS neglected tropical diseases · December 2020 Human activities can increase or decrease risks of acquiring a zoonotic disease, notably by affecting the composition and abundance of hosts. This study investigated the links between land use and infectious disease risk in northeast Madagascar, where huma ... Full text Open Access Cite

A comparison of diversity estimators applied to a database of host–parasite associations

Journal Article Ecography · September 1, 2020 Featured Publication Understanding the drivers of biodiversity is important for forecasting changes in the distribution of life on earth. However, most studies of biodiversity are limited by uneven sampling effort, with some regions or taxa better sampled than others. Numerous ... Full text Cite

Effect of urban habitat use on parasitism in mammals: A meta-analysis: Urban Habitat Use and Mammal Parasitism

Journal Article Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences · May 27, 2020 Featured Publication © 2020 The Authors. Rates of urbanization are increasing globally, with consequences for the dynamics of parasites and their wildlife hosts. A small subset of mammal species have the dietary and behavioural flexibility to survive in urban settings. The cha ... Full text Cite

Temporal patterns of waterhole use as a predator avoidance strategy

Journal Article Journal of Mammalogy · May 19, 2020 Featured Publication Animals that depend on water sources in dry environments must balance their water demands with predation risk. In settings of water scarcity, predators may strategically exploit prey's dependence on water; prey may adjust their use of water sources either ... Full text Cite

Effect of urban habitat use on parasitism in mammals: a meta-analysis.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · May 2020 Featured Publication Rates of urbanization are increasing globally, with consequences for the dynamics of parasites and their wildlife hosts. A small subset of mammal species have the dietary and behavioural flexibility to survive in urban settings. The changes that characteri ... Full text Cite

Water Availability Impacts Habitat Use by Red-Fronted Lemurs (Eulemur rufifrons): An Experimental and Observational Study

Journal Article International Journal of Primatology · February 1, 2020 With the predicted increase in extreme weather events as a result of global climate change, animals living in dry or seasonally dry habitats are likely to experience dramatic fluctuations in water availability from season to season and year to year. Unders ... Full text Cite

Metabarcoding of eukaryotic parasite communities describes diverse parasite assemblages spanning the primate phylogeny.

Journal Article Molecular ecology resources · January 2020 Despite their ubiquity, in most cases little is known about the impact of eukaryotic parasites on their mammalian hosts. Comparative approaches provide a powerful method to investigate the impact of parasites on host ecology and evolution, though two issue ... Full text Cite

Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) Group Sleep and Pathogen-Vector Avoidance: Experimental Support for the Encounter-Dilution Effect

Journal Article International Journal of Primatology · December 1, 2019 Sleep is essential for survival, yet it represents a time of extreme vulnerability, including through exposure to parasites and pathogens transmitted by biting insects. To reduce the risks of exposure to vector-borne disease, the encounter-dilution hypothe ... Full text Cite

Correction to: Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) Group Sleep and Pathogen-Vector Avoidance: Experimental Support for the Encounter-Dilution Effect (International Journal of Primatology, (2019), 40, 6, (647-659), 10.1007/s10764-019-00111-z)

Journal Article International Journal of Primatology · December 1, 2019 The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake in the authorgroup section. Author Samantha Wylie’s family name was incorrectly presented as “Wiley”. The original article has been corrected. ... Full text Cite

Fecal contamination, parasite risk, and waterhole use by wild animals in a dry deciduous forest

Journal Article Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · November 1, 2019 Abstract: Waterholes are critically important to animal survival in dry habitats but are also a potential source of parasite exposure. Avoiding feces may effectively reduce parasite transmission risk, but may also impose costs, including greater travel dis ... Full text Cite

Sleep influences cognitive performance in lemurs.

Journal Article Animal cognition · September 2019 Primates spend almost half their lives asleep, yet little is known about how sleep influences their waking cognition. We hypothesized that diurnal and cathemeral lemurs differ in their need for consistent, non-segmented sleep for next-day cognitive functio ... Full text Cite

Behavioural ecology and infectious disease: implications for conservation of biodiversity.

Journal Article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · September 2019 Behaviour underpins interactions among conspecifics and between species, with consequences for the transmission of disease-causing parasites. Because many parasites lead to declines in population size and increased risk of extinction for threatened species ... Full text Open Access Cite

Eulerian videography technology improves classification of sleep architecture in primates.

Journal Article Primates; journal of primatology · September 2019 Sleep is a critically important dimension of primate behavior, ecology, and evolution, yet primate sleep is under-studied because current methods of analyzing sleep are expensive, invasive, and time-consuming. In contrast to electroencephalography (EEG) an ... Full text Cite

The changing ecology of primate parasites: Insights from wild-captive comparisons.

Journal Article American journal of primatology · July 2019 Host movements, including migrations or range expansions, are known to influence parasite communities. Transitions to captivity-a rarely studied yet widespread human-driven host movement-can also change parasite communities, in some cases leading to pathog ... Full text Open Access Cite

Speeding in the slow lane: Phylogenetic comparative analyses reveal that not all human life history traits are exceptional.

Journal Article Journal of human evolution · May 2019 Humans are thought to exhibit an unusual suite of life history traits relative to other primates, with a longer lifespan, later age at first reproduction, and shorter interbirth interval. These assumptions are key components of popular hypotheses about hum ... Full text Cite

Coevolution and coextinction of primates and their parasites

Conference AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY · March 1, 2019 Link to item Cite

Evolutionary dynamics of sexual size dimorphism in non-volant mammals following their independent colonization of Madagascar.

Journal Article Scientific reports · February 2019 As predicted by sexual selection theory, males are larger than females in most polygynous mammals, but recent studies found that ecology and life history traits also affect sexual size dimorphism (SSD) through evolutionary changes in either male size, fema ... Full text Cite

Host traits associated with species roles in parasite sharing networks

Journal Article Oikos · January 1, 2019 The community of host species that a parasite infects is often explained by functional traits and phylogeny, predicting that closely related hosts or those with particular traits share more parasites with other hosts. Previous research has examined parasit ... Full text Cite

Quantitative uniqueness of human brain evolution revealed through phylogenetic comparative analysis.

Journal Article eLife · January 2019 While the human brain is clearly large relative to body size, less is known about the timing of brain and brain component expansion within primates and the relative magnitude of volumetric increases. Using Bayesian phylogenetic comparative methods and data ... Full text Cite

Does the moon influence sleep in small-scale societies?

Journal Article Sleep health · December 2018 ObjectivesThe lunar cycle is expected to influence sleep-wake patterns in human populations that have greater exposure to the environment, as might be found in forager populations that experience few environmental buffers. We investigated this "mo ... Full text Cite

Sexual dimorphism in immunity across animals: a meta-analysis.

Journal Article Ecology letters · December 2018 In animals, sex differences in immunity are proposed to shape variation in infection prevalence and intensity among individuals in a population, with females typically expected to exhibit superior immunity due to life-history trade-offs. We performed a sys ... Full text Cite

Sleep in a comparative context: Investigating how human sleep differs from sleep in other primates.

Journal Article American journal of physical anthropology · July 2018 ObjectivesPrimates vary in their sleep durations and, remarkably, humans sleep the least per 24-hr period of the 30 primates that have been studied. Using phylogenetic methods that quantitatively situate human phenotypes within a broader primate c ... Full text Cite

The cost of deep sleep: Environmental influences on sleep regulation are greater for diurnal lemurs.

Journal Article American journal of physical anthropology · July 2018 ObjectivesPrimates spend almost half their lives asleep, yet we know little about how evolution has shaped variation in the duration or intensity of sleep (i.e., sleep regulation) across primate species. Our objective was to test hypotheses relate ... Full text Cite

Estimating infection prevalence: Best practices and their theoretical underpinnings.

Journal Article Ecology and evolution · July 2018 Accurately estimating infection prevalence is fundamental to the study of population health, disease dynamics, and infection risk factors. Prevalence is estimated as the proportion of infected individuals ("individual-based estimation"), but is also estima ... Full text Cite

Characterizing the phylogenetic specialism-generalism spectrum of mammal parasites.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · March 2018 The distribution of parasites across mammalian hosts is complex and represents a differential ability or opportunity to infect different host species. Here, we take a macroecological approach to investigate factors influencing why some parasites show a ten ... Full text Cite

Quantifying human uniqueness through phylogenetic comparative methods

Conference AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY · March 1, 2018 Link to item Cite

A roadmap for 'core concepts' in evolutionary medicine.

Journal Article Evolution, medicine, and public health · January 2018 Full text Cite

Effective Network Size Predicted From Simulations of Pathogen Outbreaks Through Social Networks Provides a Novel Measure of Structure-Standardized Group Size.

Journal Article Frontiers in veterinary science · January 2018 The transmission of infectious disease through a population is often modeled assuming that interactions occur randomly in groups, with all individuals potentially interacting with all other individuals at an equal rate. However, it is well known that pairs ... Full text Cite

Antibacterial soap use impacts skin microbial communities in rural Madagascar.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2018 The skin harbors diverse communities of microorganisms, and alterations to these communities can impact the effectiveness of the skin as a barrier to infectious organisms or injury. As the global availability and adoption of antibacterial products increase ... Full text Cite

High prevalence of hypertension in an agricultural village in Madagascar.

Journal Article PLoS One · 2018 Elevated blood pressure presents a global health threat, with rates of hypertension increasing in low and middle-income countries. Lifestyle changes may be an important driver of these increases in blood pressure. Hypertension is particularly prevalent in ... Full text Link to item Cite

The 1918 influenza pandemic: Ecological, historical, and evolutionary perspectives.

Journal Article Evolution, medicine, and public health · January 2018 Full text Cite

Network size, structure, and pathogen transmission: A simulation study comparing different community detection algorithms

Journal Article Behaviour · January 1, 2018 Social substructure can influence pathogen transmission. Modularity measures the degree of social contact within versus between "communities" in a network, with increasing modularity expected to reduce transmission opportunities. We investigated how social ... Full text Cite

Estimating parasite host range.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · August 2017 Estimating the number of host species that a parasite can infect (i.e. host range) provides key insights into the evolution of host specialism and is a central concept in disease ecology. Host range is rarely estimated in real systems, however, because var ... Full text Cite

Segmented sleep in a nonelectric, small-scale agricultural society in Madagascar.

Journal Article Am J Hum Biol · July 8, 2017 OBJECTIVES: We studied sleep in a rural population in Madagascar to (i) characterize sleep in an equatorial small-scale agricultural population without electricity, (ii) assess whether sleep is linked to noise levels in a dense population, and (iii) examin ... Full text Link to item Cite

Identifying wildlife reservoirs of neglected taeniid tapeworms: Non-invasive diagnosis of endemic Taenia serialis infection in a wild primate population.

Journal Article PLoS neglected tropical diseases · July 2017 Despite the global distribution and public health consequences of Taenia tapeworms, the life cycles of taeniids infecting wildlife hosts remain largely undescribed. The larval stage of Taenia serialis commonly parasitizes rodents and lagomorphs, but has be ... Full text Cite

Chronotype variation drives night-time sentinel-like behaviour in hunter-gatherers.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · July 2017 Sleep is essential for survival, yet it also represents a time of extreme vulnerability to predation, hostile conspecifics and environmental dangers. To reduce the risks of sleeping, the sentinel hypothesis proposes that group-living animals share the task ... Full text Cite

Activity patterns in seven captive lemur species: Evidence of cathemerality in Varecia and Lemur catta?

Journal Article American journal of primatology · June 2017 Cathemerality, or activity throughout the 24-hr cycle, is rare in primates yet relatively common among lemurs. However, the diverse ecological conditions under which cathemerality is expressed complicates attempts to identify species-typical behavior. For ... Full text Cite

Conservation, biodiversity and infectious disease: scientific evidence and policy implications.

Journal Article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · June 2017 Full text Cite

Interacting effects of land use and climate on rodent-borne pathogens in central Kenya.

Journal Article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · June 2017 Understanding the effects of anthropogenic disturbance on zoonotic disease risk is both a critical conservation objective and a public health priority. Here, we evaluate the effects of multiple forms of anthropogenic disturbance across a precipitation grad ... Full text Cite

Dynamic vs. static social networks in models of parasite transmission: predicting Cryptosporidium spread in wild lemurs.

Journal Article The Journal of animal ecology · May 2017 Social networks provide an established tool to implement heterogeneous contact structures in epidemiological models. Dynamic temporal changes in contact structure and ranging behaviour of wildlife may impact disease dynamics. A consensus has yet to emerge, ... Full text Cite

Global Mammal Parasite Database version 2.0.

Journal Article Ecology · May 2017 Illuminating the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of parasites is one of the most pressing issues facing modern science, and is critical for basic science, the global economy, and human health. Extremely important to this effort are data on the disease ... Full text Cite

Human parasitism in a comparative context: Are humans exceptionally parasitized?

Conference AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY · April 1, 2017 Link to item Cite

Hadza sleep biology: Evidence for flexible sleep-wake patterns in hunter-gatherers.

Journal Article American journal of physical anthropology · March 2017 ObjectivesCross-cultural sleep research is critical to deciphering whether modern sleep expression is the product of recent selective pressures, or an example of evolutionary mismatch to ancestral sleep ecology. We worked with the Hadza, an equato ... Full text Cite

The Global Synanthrome Project: A Call for an Exhaustive Study of Human Associates.

Journal Article Trends in parasitology · January 2017 Here we coin the term synanthrome to describe all of the species we interact with. We propose that the time is now here for The Global Synanthrome Project to describe all of our interacting species and how they have changed through time and across space. T ... Full text Cite

Introduced Species, Disease Ecology, and Biodiversity-Disease Relationships.

Journal Article Trends in ecology & evolution · January 2017 Species introductions are a dominant component of biodiversity change but are not explicitly included in most discussions of biodiversity-disease relationships. This is a major oversight given the multitude of effects that introduced species have on both p ... Full text Cite

Does selection for short sleep duration explain human vulnerability to Alzheimer's disease?

Journal Article Evolution, medicine, and public health · January 2017 Compared with other primates, humans sleep less and have a much higher prevalence of Alzheimer 's disease (AD) pathology. This article reviews evidence relevant to the hypothesis that natural selection for shorter sleep time in humans has compromised the e ... Full text Cite

Progress and change.

Journal Article Evolution, medicine, and public health · January 2017 Full text Cite

Environmental influences on the skin microbiome of humans and cattle in rural Madagascar.

Journal Article Evolution, medicine, and public health · January 2017 Background and objectivesThe skin harbors a dynamic community of microorganisms, where contact with humans, other animals and the environment can alter microbial communities. Most research on the human skin microbiome features Western populations ... Full text Cite

Water choice as a counterstrategy to faecally transmitted disease: An experimental study in captive lemurs

Journal Article Behaviour · January 1, 2017 Many parasites and pathogens are transmitted via water, including through faecal contamination of water sources. Yet water is essential for survival, and some species gain nutritional and other benefits from coprophagy. We investigated how primates balance ... Full text Cite

What is segmented sleep? Actigraphy field validation for daytime sleep and nighttime wake.

Journal Article Sleep health · December 2016 ObjectiveTo compare different scoring parameter settings in actigraphy software for inferring sleep and wake bouts for validating analytical techniques outside of laboratory environments.DesignTo identify parameter settings that best iden ... Full text Cite

The macroecology of infectious diseases: a new perspective on global-scale drivers of pathogen distributions and impacts.

Journal Article Ecology letters · September 2016 Identifying drivers of infectious disease patterns and impacts at the broadest scales of organisation is one of the most crucial challenges for modern science, yet answers to many fundamental questions remain elusive. These include what factors commonly fa ... Full text Cite

Transparency, usability, and reproducibility: Guiding principles for improving comparative databases using primates as examples.

Journal Article Evolutionary anthropology · September 2016 Recent decades have seen rapid development of new analytical methods to investigate patterns of interspecific variation. Yet these cutting-edge statistical analyses often rely on data of questionable origin, varying accuracy, and weak comparability, which ... Full text Cite

Infectious disease and primate conservation

Chapter · June 16, 2016 AbstractInfectious disease is an important factor that may contribute to primate population declines. In addition, as primate species are lost, the parasitic organisms that coevolved with them are also lost. ... Full text Cite

Large wildlife removal drives immune defence increases in rodents

Journal Article Functional Ecology · May 1, 2016 Anthropogenic disturbances involving land use change, climate disruption, pollution and invasive species have been shown to impact immune function of wild animals. These immune changes have direct impacts on the fitness of impacted animals and, also, poten ... Full text Cite

Assessing sources of error in comparative analyses of primate behavior: Intraspecific variation in group size and the social brain hypothesis.

Journal Article Journal of human evolution · May 2016 Phylogenetic comparative methods have become standard for investigating evolutionary hypotheses, including in studies of human evolution. While these methods account for the non-independence of trait data due to phylogeny, they often fail to consider intra ... Full text Cite

A comparative analysis of evolutionary changes in human physiological traits

Conference AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY · March 1, 2016 Link to item Cite

Sleep duration, quality and timing in a non-electric population in Madagascar

Conference AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY · March 1, 2016 Link to item Cite

Shining Evolutionary Light on Human Sleep: Sleep Intensity and Human Cognition

Conference AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY · March 1, 2016 Link to item Cite

Parasite risk influences the water preferences of lemurs

Conference AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY · March 1, 2016 Link to item Cite

Shining evolutionary light on human sleep and sleep disorders.

Journal Article Evol Med Public Health · 2016 Sleep is essential to cognitive function and health in humans, yet the ultimate reasons for sleep-i.e. 'why' sleep evolved-remain mysterious. We integrate findings from human sleep studies, the ethnographic record, and the ecology and evolution of mammalia ... Full text Link to item Cite

Evolutionary change in physiological phenotypes along the human lineage.

Journal Article Evolution, medicine, and public health · January 2016 Background and objectivesResearch in evolutionary medicine provides many examples of how evolution has shaped human susceptibility to disease. Traits undergoing rapid evolutionary change may result in associated costs or reduce the energy availabl ... Full text Cite

Sleep intensity and the evolution of human cognition.

Journal Article Evolutionary anthropology · November 2015 Over the past four decades, scientists have made substantial progress in understanding the evolution of sleep patterns across the Tree of Life. Remarkably, the specifics of sleep along the human lineage have been slow to emerge. This is surprising, given o ... Full text Cite

Linking Evolution, Ecology, and Health: TriCEM

Journal Article BioScience · July 29, 2015 Full text Cite

Connecting evolution, medicine, and public health.

Journal Article Evolutionary anthropology · July 2015 Full text Cite

Sociality and health: impacts of sociality on disease susceptibility and transmission in animal and human societies.

Journal Article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · May 2015 This paper introduces a theme issue presenting the latest developments in research on the impacts of sociality on health and fitness. The articles that follow cover research on societies ranging from insects to humans. Variation in measures of fitness (i.e ... Full text Cite

Infectious disease and group size: more than just a numbers game.

Journal Article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · May 2015 Increased risk of infectious disease is assumed to be a major cost of group living, yet empirical evidence for this effect is mixed. We studied whether larger social groups are more subdivided structurally. If so, the social subdivisions that form in large ... Full text Cite

The sociality-health-fitness nexus: synthesis, conclusions and future directions.

Journal Article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · May 2015 This theme issue has highlighted the links between sociality, health and fitness in a broad range of organisms, and with approaches that include field and captive studies of animals, comparative and meta-analyses, theoretical modelling and clinical and psy ... Full text Cite

Investigating evolutionary lag using the species-pairs evolutionary lag test (SPELT).

Journal Article Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · January 2015 For traits showing correlated evolution, one trait may evolve more slowly than the other, producing evolutionary lag. The species-pairs evolutionary lag test (SPELT) uses an independent contrasts based approach to detect evolutionary lag on a phylogeny. We ... Full text Cite

Infectious disease, behavioural flexibility and the evolution of culture in primates.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · January 2015 Culturally transmitted traits are observed in a wide array of animal species, yet we understand little about the costs of the behavioural patterns that underlie culture, such as innovation and social learning. We propose that infectious diseases are a sign ... Full text Cite

Potential parasite transmission in multi-host networks based on parasite sharing.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2015 Epidemiological networks are commonly used to explore dynamics of parasite transmission among individuals in a population of a given host species. However, many parasites infect multiple host species, and thus multi-host networks may offer a better framewo ... Full text Cite

Microparasites and Placental Invasiveness in Eutherian Mammals.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2015 Placental invasiveness-the number of maternal tissue layers separating fetal tissues from maternal blood-is variable across mammalian species. Although this diversity is likely to be functionally important, variation in placental invasiveness remains unexp ... Full text Cite

The evolution of self-control.

Journal Article Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A · May 20, 2014 Cognition presents evolutionary research with one of its greatest challenges. Cognitive evolution has been explained at the proximate level by shifts in absolute and relative brain volume and at the ultimate level by differences in social and dietary compl ... Full text Link to item Cite

Interactions between micro- and macroparasites predict microparasite species richness across primates.

Journal Article The American naturalist · April 2014 Most wild animals face concurrent challenges by multiple infectious organisms, and immunological responses triggered by some parasites may increase susceptibility to other infectious agents. Immune-mediated interactions among parasites have been investigat ... Full text Cite

Shared resources and disease dynamics in spatially structured populations

Journal Article Ecological Modelling · January 24, 2014 Infectious agents are likely to spread among animals that live together, yet we know remarkably little about how infectious agents move among social units. Sharing of resources - such as shared waterholes during a dry season - may provide an efficient rout ... Full text Cite

Mating Competition, Promiscuity, and Life History Traits as Predictors of Sexually Transmitted Disease Risk in Primates

Journal Article International Journal of Primatology · January 1, 2014 Competition among males influences the distribution of copulations and should therefore influence the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). We developed a model to investigate STDs in the mating and social systems found in primates, and we tested ... Full text Cite

Phylogenetic prediction to identify “evolutionary singularities”

Chapter · January 1, 2014 Understanding adaptive patterns is especially difficult in the case of “evolutionary singularities,” i.e., traits that evolved in only one lineage in the clade of interest. New methods are needed to integrate our understanding of general phenotypic correla ... Full text Cite

Cultural inheritance or cultural diffusion of religious violence? A quantitative case study of the Radical Reformation

Journal Article Religion, Brain and Behavior · July 2, 2013 Religion throughout the historical record is consistently associated with large-scale cooperative activities. These cooperative activities sometimes involve coordinated acts of violence, particularly against religious out-groups. Using phylogenetic and soc ... Full text Cite

Does habitat disturbance increase infectious disease risk for primates?

Journal Article Ecology letters · May 2013 Many studies have suggested that ecosystem conservation protects human and wildlife populations against infectious disease. We tested this hypothesis using data on primates and their parasites. First, we tested for relationships between species' resilience ... Full text Cite

Centrality in primate-parasite networks reveals the potential for the transmission of emerging infectious diseases to humans.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · May 2013 Most emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) in humans have arisen from animals. Identifying high-risk hosts is therefore vital for the control and surveillance of these diseases. Viewing hosts as connected through the parasites they share, we use network tool ... Full text Cite

Identifying future zoonotic disease threats: Where are the gaps in our understanding of primate infectious diseases?

Journal Article Evolution, Medicine and Public Health · January 1, 2013 Background and objectives: Emerging infectious diseases often originate in wildlife, making it important to identify infectious agents in wild populations. It is widely acknowledged that wild animals are incompletely sampled for infectious agents, especial ... Full text Cite

Pathogen flow: what we need to know.

Journal Article American journal of primatology · December 2012 Full text Cite

Phylogenetic host specificity and understanding parasite sharing in primates.

Journal Article Ecology letters · December 2012 Understanding how parasites are transmitted to new species is of great importance for human health, agriculture and conservation. However, it is still unclear why some parasites are shared by many species, while others have only one host. Using a new measu ... Full text Cite

Informatics approaches to develop dynamic meta-analyses

Journal Article Evolutionary Ecology · September 1, 2012 Full text Cite

Do animals living in larger groups experience greater parasitism? A meta-analysis.

Journal Article The American naturalist · July 2012 Parasitism is widely viewed as the primary cost of sociality and a constraint on group size, yet studies report varied associations between group size and parasitism. Using the largest database of its kind, we performed a meta-analysis of 69 studies of the ... Full text Cite

Community structure and the spread of infectious disease in primate social networks

Journal Article Evolutionary Ecology · July 1, 2012 Living in a large social group is thought to increase disease risk in wild animal populations, but comparative studies have provided mixed support for this prediction. Here, we take a social network perspective to investigate whether patterns of social con ... Full text Cite

Primate disease ecology in comparative and theoretical perspective.

Journal Article American journal of primatology · June 2012 Infectious disease plays a major role in the lives of wild primates, and the past decade has witnessed significant strides in our understanding of primate disease ecology. In this review, I briefly describe some key findings from phylogenetic comparative a ... Full text Cite

Innovative Approaches to the Relationship Between Diet and Mandibular Morphology in Primates

Journal Article International Journal of Primatology · June 1, 2012 Attempts to establish relationships between mandibular morphology and either traditional dietary categories or geometric and material properties of primate diets have not been particularly successful. Using our conceptual framework of the feeding factors i ... Full text Cite

How does cognition evolve? Phylogenetic comparative psychology.

Journal Article Anim Cogn · March 2012 Now more than ever animal studies have the potential to test hypotheses regarding how cognition evolves. Comparative psychologists have developed new techniques to probe the cognitive mechanisms underlying animal behavior, and they have become increasingly ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Evolutionary disequilibrium and activity period in primates: a bayesian phylogenetic approach.

Journal Article American journal of physical anthropology · March 2012 Activity period plays a central role in studies of primate origins and adaptations, yet fundamental questions remain concerning the evolutionary history of primate activity period. Lemurs are of particular interest because they display marked variation in ... Full text Cite

Do parasites constrain group size? A phylogenetic comparative study and meta-analysis.

Conference AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY · January 1, 2012 Link to item Cite

Host longevity and parasite species richness in mammals.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2012 Hosts and parasites co-evolve, with each lineage exerting selective pressures on the other. Thus, parasites may influence host life-history characteristics, such as longevity, and simultaneously host life-history may influence parasite diversity. If parasi ... Full text Cite

Phylogenetic rate shifts in feeding time during the evolution of Homo.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · August 2011 Unique among animals, humans eat a diet rich in cooked and nonthermally processed food. The ancestors of modern humans who invented food processing (including cooking) gained critical advantages in survival and fitness through increased caloric intake. How ... Full text Cite

Modeling imitation and emulation in constrained search spaces.

Journal Article Learning & behavior · May 2011 Social transmission of behavior can be realized through distinct mechanisms. Research on primate social learning typically distinguishes two forms of information that a learner can extract from a demonstrator: copying actions (defined as imitation) or copy ... Full text Cite

Mutualism or parasitism? Using a phylogenetic approach to characterize the oxpecker-ungulate relationship.

Journal Article Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · May 2011 With their striking predilection for perching on African ungulates and eating their ticks, yellow-billed (Buphagus africanus) and red-billed oxpeckers (B. erythrorhynchus) represent one of the few potentially mutualistic relationships among vertebrates. Th ... Full text Cite

Testing for divergent transmission histories among cultural characters: a study using Bayesian phylogenetic methods and Iranian tribal textile data.

Journal Article PloS one · April 2011 BackgroundArchaeologists and anthropologists have long recognized that different cultural complexes may have distinct descent histories, but they have lacked analytical techniques capable of easily identifying such incongruence. Here, we show how ... Full text Cite

Primate extinction risk and historical patterns of speciation and extinction in relation to body mass.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · April 2011 Body mass is thought to influence diversification rates, but previous studies have produced ambiguous results. We investigated patterns of diversification across 100 trees obtained from a new Bayesian inference of primate phylogeny that sampled trees in pr ... Full text Cite

Predation and the phasing of sleep: An evolutionary individual-based model

Journal Article Animal Behaviour · January 1, 2011 All mammals thus far studied sleep, yet important questions remain concerning the ecological factors that influence sleep patterns. Here, we developed an evolutionary individual-based model to investigate the effect of predation pressure on prey sleep. We ... Full text Cite

The spread of fecally transmitted parasites in socially-structured populations.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2011 Mammals are infected by a wide array of gastrointestinal parasites, including parasites that also infect humans and domesticated animals. Many of these parasites are acquired through contact with infectious stages present in soil, feces or vegetation, sugg ... Full text Cite

Effects of the distribution of female primates on the number of males.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2011 The spatiotemporal distribution of females is thought to drive variation in mating systems, and hence plays a central role in understanding animal behavior, ecology and evolution. Previous research has focused on investigating the links between female spat ... Full text Cite

Parasite-mediated evolution of the functional part of the MHC in primates.

Journal Article Journal of evolutionary biology · January 2011 The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is a key model of genetic polymorphism, but the mechanisms underlying its extreme variability are debated. Most hypotheses for MHC diversity focus on pathogen-driven selection and predict that MHC polymorphism evo ... Full text Cite

Simulating trait evolution for cross-cultural comparison.

Journal Article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · December 2010 Cross-cultural anthropologists have increasingly used phylogenetic methods to study cultural variation. Because cultural behaviours can be transmitted horizontally among socially defined groups, however, it is important to assess whether phylogeny-based me ... Full text Cite

Phylogenetic targeting of research effort in evolutionary biology.

Journal Article The American naturalist · November 2010 Many questions in comparative biology require that new data be collected, either to build a comparative database for the first time or to augment existing data. Given resource limitations in collecting data, the question arises as to which species should b ... Full text Cite

Investigating the impact of observation errors on the statistical performance of network-based diffusion analysis.

Journal Article Learning & behavior · August 2010 Experiments in captivity have provided evidence for social learning, but it remains challenging to demonstrate social learning in the wild. Recently, we developed network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA; 2009) as a new approach to inferring social learning ... Full text Cite

Sexual dimorphism in primate aerobic capacity: a phylogenetic test.

Journal Article Journal of evolutionary biology · June 2010 Male intrasexual competition should favour increased male physical prowess. This should in turn result in greater aerobic capacity in males than in females (i.e. sexual dimorphism) and a correlation between sexual dimorphism in aerobic capacity and the str ... Full text Cite

The 10kTrees website: A new online resource for primate phylogeny

Journal Article Evolutionary Anthropology · May 1, 2010 The comparative method plays a central role in efforts to uncover the adaptive basis for primate behaviors, morphological traits, and cognitive abilities.1-4 The comparative method has been used, for example, to infer that living in a larger group selects ... Full text Cite

Infectious Diseases in Primates: Behavior, Ecology and Evolution

Journal Article Infectious Diseases in Primates: Behavior, Ecology and Evolution · April 1, 2010 Recent progress in the field of wildlife disease ecology demonstrates that infectious disease plays a crucial role in the lives of wild animals. Parasites and pathogens should be especially important for social animals in which high contact among individua ... Full text Cite

Comparative chewing efficiency in mammalian herbivores

Journal Article Oikos · November 1, 2009 Although the relevance of particle size reduction in herbivore digestion is widely appreciated, few studies have investigated digesta particle size across species in relation to body mass or digestive strategy. We investigated faecal particle size, which r ... Full text Cite

Evidence for a tradeoff between retention time and chewing efficiency in large mammalian herbivores.

Journal Article Comparative biochemistry and physiology. Part A, Molecular & integrative physiology · November 2009 Large body size is thought to produce a digestive advantage through different scaling effects of gut capacity and food intake, with supposedly longer digesta retention times in larger animals. However, empirical tests of this framework have remained equivo ... Full text Cite

Rapid evolution of social learning.

Journal Article Journal of evolutionary biology · September 2009 Culture is widely thought to be beneficial when social learning is less costly than individual learning and thus may explain the enormous ecological success of humans. Rogers (1988. Does biology constrain culture. Am. Anthropol. 90: 819-831) contradicted t ... Full text Cite

Examining landscape factors influencing relative distribution of mosquito genera and frequency of virus infection.

Journal Article EcoHealth · June 2009 Mosquito-borne infections cause some of the most debilitating human diseases, including yellow fever and malaria, yet we lack an understanding of how disease risk scales with human-driven habitat changes. We present an approach to study variation in mosqui ... Full text Cite

Do transmission mechanisms or social systems drive cultural dynamics in socially structured populations?

Journal Article Animal Behaviour · June 1, 2009 Cultural traits spread via multiple mechanisms among individuals within social groups, including via transmission biases that occur when subordinates copy from dominants (prestige transmission), or via common cultural trait variants that are favoured over ... Full text Cite

Network-based diffusion analysis: a new method for detecting social learning.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · May 2009 Social learning has been documented in a wide diversity of animals. In free-living animals, however, it has been difficult to discern whether animals learn socially by observing other group members or asocially by acquiring a new behaviour independently. W ... Full text Cite

Non-invasive body temperature measurement of wild chimpanzees using fecal temperature decline.

Journal Article Journal of wildlife diseases · April 2009 New methods are required to increase our understanding of pathologic processes in wild mammals. We developed a noninvasive field method to estimate the body temperature of wild living chimpanzees habituated to humans, based on statistically fitting tempera ... Full text Cite

Does sleep play a role in memory consolidation? A comparative test

Journal Article PLoS ONE · February 25, 2009 Sleep is a pervasive characteristic of mammalian species, yet its purpose remains obscure. It is often proposed that 'sleep is for the brain', a view that is supported by experimental studies showing that sleep improves cognitive processes such as memory c ... Full text Cite

Introduction

Chapter · January 1, 2009 Why do we and other animals sleep? When we are asleep, we are not performing activities that are important for reproductive success, such as locating food, caring for offspring, or finding mates. In the wild, sleep might make an animal more vulnerable to p ... Full text Cite

Ecological constraints on mammalian sleep architecture

Chapter · January 1, 2009 All mammals so far studied experience some form of sleep. When mammals are sleep-deprived, they generally attempt to regain the lost sleep by exhibiting a “sleep rebound,” suggesting that sleep serves important functions that cannot be neglected (Siegel, 2 ... Full text Cite

Evolution of sleep: Phylogenetic and functional perspectives

Book · January 1, 2009 Research during the past two decades has produced major advances in understanding sleep within particular species. Simultaneously, molecular advances have made it possible to generate phylogenetic trees, while new analytical methods provide the tools to ex ... Full text Cite

Primate sleep in phylogenetic perspective

Chapter · January 1, 2009 The primates comprise a diverse group of eutherian mammals, with between some 200 and 400 species, depending on the taxonomic authority consulted (e.g., Corbet & Hill, 1991; Wilson & Reeder, 2005). Most of these species dwell in tropical forests, but prima ... Full text Cite

The causes and consequences of reproductive skew in male primates

Journal Article · January 1, 2009 This chapter discusses the underlying causes and consequences of reproductive skew in male primates. Although our understanding of the causes of skew is still in its infancy, empirical studies thus far support the compromise framework (e.g. tug-of-war mode ... Full text Cite

Does sleep play a role in memory consolidation? A comparative test.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2009 Sleep is a pervasive characteristic of mammalian species, yet its purpose remains obscure. It is often proposed that 'sleep is for the brain', a view that is supported by experimental studies showing that sleep improves cognitive processes such as memory c ... Full text Cite

Parasite resistance and the adaptive significance of sleep.

Journal Article BMC evolutionary biology · January 2009 BackgroundSleep is a biological enigma. Despite occupying much of an animal's life, and having been scrutinized by numerous experimental studies, there is still no consensus on its function. Similarly, no hypothesis has yet explained why species h ... Full text Cite

Stepwise model fitting and statistical inference: turning noise into signal pollution.

Journal Article The American naturalist · January 2009 Statistical inference based on stepwise model selection is applied regularly in ecological, evolutionary, and behavioral research. In addition to fundamental shortcomings with regard to finding the "best" model, stepwise procedures are known to suffer from ... Full text Cite

On sexual dimorphism in immune function.

Journal Article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · January 2009 Sexual dimorphism in immune function is a common pattern in vertebrates and also in a number of invertebrates. Most often, females are more 'immunocompetent' than males. The underlying causes are explained by either the role of immunosuppressive substances ... Full text Cite

Female reproductive synchrony predicts skewed paternity across primates

Journal Article Behavioral Ecology · November 26, 2008 Recent studies have uncovered remarkable variation in paternity within primate groups. To date, however, we lack a general understanding of the factors that drive variation in paternity skew among primate groups and across species. Our study focused on hyp ... Full text Cite

Energetic constraints, not predation, influence the evolution of sleep patterning in mammals.

Journal Article Functional ecology · October 2008 Mammalian sleep is composed of two distinct states - rapid-eye-movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM) sleep - that alternate in cycles over a sleep bout. The duration of these cycles varies extensively across mammalian species. Because the end of a sleep cycle ... Full text Cite

Phylogenetic analysis of the ecology and evolution of mammalian sleep.

Journal Article Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · July 2008 The amount of time asleep varies greatly in mammals, from 3 h in the donkey to 20 h in the armadillo. Previous comparative studies have suggested several functional explanations for interspecific variation in both the total time spent asleep and in rapid-e ... Full text Cite

Emerging infectious diseases and animal social systems

Journal Article Evolutionary Ecology · July 1, 2008 Emerging infectious diseases threaten a wide diversity of animals, and important questions remain concerning disease emergence in socially structured populations. We developed a spatially explicit simulation model to investigate whether-and under what cond ... Full text Cite

The influence of natural diet composition, food intake level, and body size on ingesta passage in primates.

Journal Article Comparative biochemistry and physiology. Part A, Molecular & integrative physiology · July 2008 An important component of digestive physiology involves ingesta mean retention time (MRT), which describes the time available for digestion. At least three different variables have been proposed to influence MRT in herbivorous mammals: body mass, diet type ... Full text Cite

To sleep or not to sleep: the ecology of sleep in artificial organisms.

Journal Article BMC ecology · May 2008 BackgroundAll animals thus far studied sleep, but little is known about the ecological factors that generate differences in sleep characteristics across species, such as total sleep duration or division of sleep into multiple bouts across the 24-h ... Full text Cite

A comparative study of conflict resolution in macaques: insights into the nature of trait covariation

Journal Article Animal Behaviour · March 1, 2008 Conflict resolution is an essential component of primate sociality that has been studied extensively within primate social groups, but few studies have examined how conflict resolution behaviours covary at evolutionary scales. We assembled a standardized d ... Full text Cite

Integrative approaches to the study of primate infectious disease: implications for biodiversity conservation and global health.

Journal Article American journal of physical anthropology · January 2008 The close phylogenetic relationship between humans and nonhuman primates, coupled with the exponential expansion of human populations and human activities within primate habitats, has resulted in exceptionally high potential for pathogen exchange. Emerging ... Full text Cite

Infectious diseases and extinction risk in wild mammals.

Journal Article Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · October 2007 Parasite-driven declines in wildlife have become increasingly common and can pose significant risks to natural populations. We used the IUCN Red List of Threatened and Endangered Species and compiled data on hosts threatened by infectious disease and their ... Full text Cite

A global gap analysis of infectious agents in wild primates

Journal Article Diversity and Distributions · September 1, 2007 A number of infectious diseases have emerged as threats to humans and wildlife. Despite the growing importance of georeferenced data for mitigating disease risk, information on parasite threat is patchily distributed at a global scale. In this paper, we ex ... Full text Cite

Parasite species richness in carnivores: Effects of host body mass, latitude, geographical range and population density

Journal Article Global Ecology and Biogeography · July 1, 2007 Aim: Comparative studies have revealed strong links between ecological factors and the number of parasite species harboured by different hosts, but studies of different taxonomic host groups have produced inconsistent results. As a step towards understandi ... Full text Cite

Primate brain architecture and selection in relation to sex.

Journal Article BMC biology · May 2007 BackgroundSocial and competitive demands often differ between the sexes in mammals. These differing demands should be expected to produce variation in the relative sizes of various brain structures. Sexual selection on males can be predicted to in ... Full text Cite

Why are some species more commonly afflicted by arthritis than others? A comparative study of spondyloarthropathy in primates and carnivores.

Journal Article Journal of evolutionary biology · March 2007 Spondyloarthropathy is a painful arthritic affliction of humans that also occurs in wild mammals. Important questions remain concerning the underlying causes of spondyloarthropathy in mammals, particularly regarding whether it is infectious in origin or dr ... Full text Cite

Do threatened hosts have fewer parasites? A comparative study in primates.

Journal Article The Journal of animal ecology · March 2007 1. Parasites and infectious diseases have become a major concern in conservation biology, in part because they can trigger or accelerate species or population declines. Focusing on primates as a well-studied host clade, we tested whether the species richne ... Full text Cite

Ranging patterns and parasitism in primates.

Journal Article Biology letters · September 2006 Competing hypotheses exist concerning the influence of ranging patterns on parasitism. More intensive use of a home range could result in greater exposure to infectious agents that accumulate in the soil. Alternatively, when more intensive ranging is assoc ... Full text Cite

Comparative tests of reproductive skew in male primates: The roles of demographic factors and incomplete control

Journal Article Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · September 1, 2006 Reproductive skew models have been proposed as a unifying framework for understanding animal social systems, but few studies have investigated reproductive skew in a broad evolutionary context. We compiled data on the distribution of mating among males for ... Full text Cite

Pathogens as drivers of population declines: The importance of systematic monitoring in great apes and other threatened mammals

Journal Article Biological Conservation · August 1, 2006 Until recently, the focus of great ape behavioural and ecological research has been distinct from the focus of scientists working in medical and veterinary sciences. More scientists are calling for a connection between medical and field research due to rec ... Full text Cite

Comparative methods for studying cultural trait evolution: A simulation study

Journal Article Cross-Cultural Research · May 1, 2006 Anthropologists and archaeologists increasingly use phylogenetic methods to test hypotheses involving cross-cultural traits, but the appropriateness of applying tree-based methods to analyze cultural traits is unclear. The authors developed a spatially exp ... Full text Cite

Cultural macroevolution and the transmission of traits

Journal Article Evolutionary Anthropology · March 1, 2006 Cultural traits are distributed across human societies in a patterned way. Study of the mechanisms whereby cultural traits persist and change over time is key to understanding human cultural diversity. For more than a century, a central question has engage ... Full text Cite

Malaria infection and host behavior: A comparative study of Neotropical primates

Journal Article Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · November 1, 2005 Parasites are ubiquitous in populations of free-ranging animals and impact host fitness, but virtually nothing is known about the factors that influence patterns of disease risk across species and the effectiveness of behavioral defenses to reduce this ris ... Full text Cite

Patterns of host specificity and transmission among parasites of wild primates.

Journal Article International journal for parasitology · May 2005 Multihost parasites have been implicated in the emergence of new diseases in humans and wildlife, yet little is known about factors that influence the host range of parasites in natural populations. We used a comprehensive data set of 415 micro- and macrop ... Full text Cite

Latitudinal gradients of parasite species richness in primates

Journal Article Diversity and Distributions · May 1, 2005 Infectious disease risk is thought to increase in the tropics, but little is known about latitudinal gradients of parasite diversity. We used a comparative data set encompassing 330 parasite species reported from 119 primate hosts to examine latitudinal gr ... Full text Cite

Parasites and the evolutionary diversification of primate clades.

Journal Article The American naturalist · November 2004 Coevolutionary interactions such as those between hosts and parasites have been regarded as an underlying cause of evolutionary diversification, but evidence from natural populations is limited. Among primates and other mammalian groups, measures of host d ... Full text Cite

Patterns of participation and free riding in territorial conflicts among ringtailed lemurs (Lemur catta)

Journal Article Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · November 1, 2004 Cooperation in animal social groups may be limited by the threat of "free riding," the potential for individuals to reap the benefits of other individuals' actions without paying their share of the costs. Here we investigate the factors that influence indi ... Full text Cite

Females drive primate social evolution.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · February 2004 Within and across species of primates, the number of males in primate groups is correlated with the number of females. This correlation may arise owing to ecological forces operating on females, with subsequent competition among males for access to groups ... Full text Cite

Body size, diet and sociality influence the species richness of parasitic worms in anthropoid primates

Journal Article Evolutionary Ecology Research · February 1, 2004 Free-ranging animals are exposed to a diverse array of parasitic worms, including nematodes, trematodes, cestodes and acanthocephalans. Across host species, the number and types of parasite species are expected to depend on both host and parasite character ... Cite

Comparative tests of parasite species richness in primates.

Journal Article The American naturalist · November 2003 Some hosts harbor diverse parasite communities, whereas others are relatively parasite free. Many factors have been proposed to account for patterns of parasite species richness, but few studies have investigated competing hypotheses among multiple parasit ... Full text Cite

Behavioral defences against sexually transmitted diseases in primates

Journal Article Animal Behaviour · July 1, 2003 Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are known to exist in wild and domesticated animals, but little is know about behavioural defences that animals use to reduce the risk of acquiring STDs. Using comparative data and a phylogeny of primates, I investigate ... Full text Cite

A comparative study of white blood cell counts and disease risk in carnivores.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · February 2003 In primates, baseline levels of white blood cell (WBC) counts are related to mating promiscuity. It was hypothesized that differences in the primate immune system reflect pathogen risks from sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Here, we test for the gener ... Full text Cite

Social Organization and Parasite Risk in Mammals: Integrating Theory and Empirical Studies

Journal Article Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics · January 1, 2003 Mammals are exposed to a diverse array of parasites and infectious diseases, many of which affect host survival and reproduction. Species that live in dense populations, large social groups, or with promiscuous mating systems may be especially vulnerable t ... Full text Cite

Do male "long-distance calls" function in mate defense? A comparative study of long-distance calls in primates

Journal Article Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · November 1, 2002 Long-distance calls produced by males are common among vertebrate species. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain features of male long-distance calls and their phylogenetic distribution in primates, but the putative functions of male long-distan ... Full text Cite

Spleen size, disease risk and sexual selection: A comparative study in primates

Journal Article Evolutionary Ecology Research · January 1, 2002 If individuals of different species vary in their risk of acquiring infectious disease, this variation is expected to result in systematic differences in immune defence structures across species. I used phylogenetic comparative methods to examine the corre ... Cite

A comparative study of leukocyte counts and disease risk in primates.

Journal Article Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · January 2002 Little is known about how the risk of disease varies across species and its consequences for host defenses, including the immune system. I obtained mean values of basal white blood cells (WBC) from 100 species of primates to quantify disease risk, based on ... Full text Cite

Do exaggerated sexual swellings function in female mating competition in primates? A comparative test of the reliable indicator hypothesis

Journal Article Behavioral Ecology · January 1, 2001 The reliable indicator hypothesis proposes that exaggerated sexual swellings in female primates serve as honest signals of female quality that function in female-female competition over mates. We examined a version of this hypothesis using interspecific da ... Full text Cite

Comparative methods for studying primate adaptation and allometry

Journal Article Evolutionary Anthropology · January 1, 2001 A well-known comparative biologist was once asked by a field biologist whether the latter's detailed and painstaking field study of orangutan behavior, carried out over many years, qualified as an example of the comparative method."No, " replied the compar ... Full text Cite

Allometric Slopes and Independent Contrasts: A Comparative Test of Kleiber's Law in Primate Ranging Patterns.

Journal Article The American naturalist · November 2000 At the most fundamental level, the size of an animal's home range is determined by its energy needs. In the absence of confounding variables, home range size should therefore scale with body mass according to Kleiber's exponent for metabolic rate of 0.75. ... Full text Cite

Promiscuity and the primate immune system.

Journal Article Science (New York, N.Y.) · November 2000 The behavioral and ecological factors involved in immune system evolution remain poorly explored. We present a phylogenetic analysis of white blood cell counts in primates to test three hypotheses related to disease risk: increases in risk are expected wit ... Full text Cite

Group histories and offspring sex ratios in ringtailed lemurs (Lemur catta)

Journal Article Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · June 1, 2000 Birth sex ratios were examined for ringtailed lemurs (Lemur catta) at the Duke University Primate Center. This population provides a long-term database of births under a variety of demographic and management conditions, including two semi-freeranging group ... Full text Cite

Maternal recognition of infant calls in ring-tailed lemurs.

Journal Article Folia primatologica; international journal of primatology · May 2000 Full text Cite

Comparative tests of primate cognition: different scaling methods produce different results.

Journal Article Brain, behavior and evolution · January 2000 Although early comparative studies supported hypotheses that ecological demands selected for primate cognition, later work indicated that social demands were more important. One difference between earlier and later studies is that earlier studies scaled br ... Full text Cite

The evolution of exaggerated sexual swellings in primates and the graded-signal hypothesis.

Journal Article Animal behaviour · August 1999 Females of some Old World primate taxa advertise their sexual receptivity with exaggerated sexual swellings. Although a number of hypotheses have been proposed, the function of this conspicuous trait remains unsolved. This review updates information on the ... Full text Cite

The number of males in primate social groups: A comparative test of the socioecological model

Journal Article Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · June 1, 1999 As applied to polygynous mammals, the socioecological model assumes that environmental risks and resources determine the spatial and temporal distribution of females, which then sets male strategies for monopolizing fertile matings. The effects of female s ... Full text Cite

How quickly do brains catch up with bodies? A comparative method for detecting evolutionary lag.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · April 1999 A trait may be at odds with theoretical expectation because it is still in the process of responding to a recent selective force. Such a situation can be termed evolutionary lag. Although many cases of evolutionary lag have been suggested, almost all of th ... Full text Cite

The number of males in primate social groups: a comparative test of the socioecological model.

Conference AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY · January 1, 1999 Link to item Cite

Statistical analyses of developmental sequences: the craniofacial region in marsupial and placental mammals.

Journal Article The American naturalist · July 1998 Heterochrony is most often thought to involve changes in the rate of development or maturation (rate changes). However, heterochrony can also involve changes in the timing of specific developmental events relative to other events (sequence changes). Sequen ... Full text Cite

A simulation test of Smith's "Degrees of freedom" correction for comparative studies.

Journal Article American journal of physical anthropology · November 1995 Computer simulation was used to test Smith's (1994) correction for phylogenetic nonindependence in comparative studies. Smith's method find effective N, which is computed using nested analysis of variance, and uses this value in place of observed N as the ... Full text Cite