Female and male life tables for seven wild primate species

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Abstract

We provide male and female census count data, age-specific survivorship, and female age-specific fertility estimates for populations of seven wild primates that have been continuously monitored for at least 29 years: sifaka ( Propithecus verreauxi) in Madagascar; muriqui ( Brachyteles hypoxanthus) in Brazil; capuchin ( Cebus capucinus) in Costa Rica; baboon ( Papio cynocephalus) and blue monkey ( Cercopithecus mitis) in Kenya; chimpanzee ( Pan troglodytes) in Tanzania; and gorilla ( Gorilla beringei) in Rwanda. Using one-year age-class intervals, we computed point estimates of age-specific survival for both sexes. In all species, our survival estimates for the dispersing sex are affected by heavy censoring. We also calculated reproductive value, life expectancy, and mortality hazards for females. We used bootstrapping to place confidence intervals on life-table summary metrics ( R ₀, the net reproductive rate; λ, the population growth rate; and G, the generation time). These data have high potential for reuse; they derive from continuous population monitoring of long-lived organisms and will be invaluable for addressing questions about comparative demography, primate conservation and human evolution.

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Diversity of ageing across the tree of life.

Owen R. Jones, Alexander Scheuerlein, Roberto Salguero-Gómez … (2014)

Evolution drives, and is driven by, demography. A genotype moulds its phenotype's age patterns of mortality and fertility in an environment; these two patterns in turn determine the genotype's fitness in that environment. Hence, to understand the evolution of ageing, age patterns of mortality and reproduction need to be compared for species across the tree of life. However, few studies have done so and only for a limited range of taxa. Here we contrast standardized patterns over age for 11 mammals, 12 other vertebrates, 10 invertebrates, 12 vascular plants and a green alga. Although it has been predicted that evolution should inevitably lead to increasing mortality and declining fertility with age after maturity, there is great variation among these species, including increasing, constant, decreasing, humped and bowed trajectories for both long- and short-lived species. This diversity challenges theoreticians to develop broader perspectives on the evolution of ageing and empiricists to study the demography of more species.

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Extreme Conservation Leads to Recovery of the Virunga Mountain Gorillas

Martha Robbins, Markye Gray, Katie A. Fawcett … (2011)

As wildlife populations are declining, conservationists are under increasing pressure to measure the effectiveness of different management strategies. Conventional conservation measures such as law enforcement and community development projects are typically designed to minimize negative human influences upon a species and its ecosystem. In contrast, we define “extreme” conservation as efforts targeted to deliberately increase positive human influences, including veterinary care and close monitoring of individual animals. Here we compare the impact of both conservation approaches upon the population growth rate of the critically endangered Virunga mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei), which increased by 50% since their nadir in 1981, from approximately 250 to nearly 400 gorillas. Using demographic data from 1967–2008, we show an annual decline of 0.7%±0.059% for unhabituated gorillas that received intensive levels of conventional conservation approaches, versus an increase 4.1%±0.088% for habituated gorillas that also received extreme conservation measures. Each group of habituated gorillas is now continuously guarded by a separate team of field staff during daylight hours and receives veterinary treatment for snares, respiratory disease, and other life-threatening conditions. These results suggest that conventional conservation efforts prevented a severe decline of the overall population, but additional extreme measures were needed to achieve positive growth. Demographic stochasticity and socioecological factors had minimal impact on variability in the growth rates. Veterinary interventions could account for up to 40% of the difference in growth rates between habituated versus unhabituated gorillas, with the remaining difference likely arising from greater protection against poachers. Thus, by increasing protection and facilitating veterinary treatment, the daily monitoring of each habituated group contributed to most of the difference in growth rates. Our results argue for wider consideration of extreme measures and offer a startling view of the enormous resources that may be needed to conserve some endangered species.

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Low demographic variability in wild primate populations: fitness impacts of variation, covariation, and serial correlation in vital rates.

Susan C. Alberts, Marina Cords, S Brockman … (2010)

In a stochastic environment, long-term fitness can be influenced by variation, covariation, and serial correlation in vital rates (survival and fertility). Yet no study of an animal population has parsed the contributions of these three aspects of variability to long-term fitness. We do so using a unique database that includes complete life-history information for wild-living individuals of seven primate species that have been the subjects of long-term (22-45 years) behavioral studies. Overall, the estimated levels of vital rate variation had only minor effects on long-term fitness, and the effects of vital rate covariation and serial correlation were even weaker. To explore why, we compared estimated variances of adult survival in primates with values for other vertebrates in the literature and found that adult survival is significantly less variable in primates than it is in the other vertebrates. Finally, we tested the prediction that adult survival, because it more strongly influences fitness in a constant environment, will be less variable than newborn survival, and we found only mixed support for the prediction. Our results suggest that wild primates may be buffered against detrimental fitness effects of environmental stochasticity by their highly developed cognitive abilities, social networks, and broad, flexible diets.

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Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Sci Data

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Sci Data

Title: Scientific Data

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group

ISSN (Electronic): 2052-4463

Publication date (Electronic): 01 March 2016

Publication date Collection: 2016

Volume: 3

Electronic Location Identifier: 160006

Affiliations

[1 ] Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University , Ames, Iowa 50011, USA

[2 ] Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology, Columbia University , New York, New York 10027, USA

[3 ] Department of Biology, Duke University , Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA

[4 ] Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya , Nairobi, Kenya

[5 ] Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University , Princeton, New Jersey 88001, USA

[6 ] Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina , Charlotte, North Carolina 28223, USA

[7 ] Department of Anthropology, University of Calgary , Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4

[8 ] Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University , Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA

[9 ] The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International and Zoo Atlanta , Atlanta, Georgia 30315, USA

[10 ] Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison , Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA

[11 ]These authors contributed equally to this work

Author notes

[a ] A.M.B. (email: abroniko@ 123456iastate.edu ).

[]

S.C.A., J.A., D.K.B., M.C., L.M.F., A.P., T.S., and K.B.S. collected and contributed data. A.M.B. and W.F.M. analysed the data. A.M.B., W.F.M., and M.C. wrote the paper. S.C.A. and K.B.S. organized the working group that produced the analyses herein. All authors contributed to the final paper.

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Karen B. Strier http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2520-9110

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Publisher Item ID: sdata20166

DOI: 10.1038/sdata.2016.6

PMC ID: 4772651

PubMed ID: 26928014

SO-VID: 0ff322e4-4c54-4d4a-a78b-1505c33ce127

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Female and male life tables for seven wild primate species

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Most cited references 5

Diversity of ageing across the tree of life.

Extreme Conservation Leads to Recovery of the Virunga Mountain Gorillas

Low demographic variability in wild primate populations: fitness impacts of variation, covariation, and serial correlation in vital rates.

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