The Behavioral Ecology of the Tibetan Macaque
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Fascinating Life Sciences Jin-Hua Li · Lixing Sun Peter M. Kappeler Editors The Behavioral Ecology of the Tibetan Macaque Fascinating Life Sciences This interdisciplinary series brings together the most essential and captivating topics in the life sciences. They range from the plant sciences to zoology, from the microbiome to macrobiome, and from basic biology to biotechnology. The series not only highlights fascinating research; it also discusses major challenges associ- ated with the life sciences and related disciplines and outlines future research directions. Individual volumes provide in-depth information, are richly illustrated with photographs, illustrations, and maps, and feature suggestions for further reading or glossaries where appropriate. Interested researchers in all areas of the life sciences, as well as biology enthu- siasts, will find the series’ interdisciplinary focus and highly readable volumes especially appealing. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15408 Jin-Hua Li • Lixing Sun • Peter M. Kappeler Editors The Behavioral Ecology of the Tibetan Macaque Editors Jin-Hua Li Lixing Sun School of Resources Department of Biological Sciences, Primate and Environmental Engineering Behavior and Ecology Program Anhui University Central Washington University Hefei, Anhui, China Ellensburg, WA, USA International Collaborative Research Center for Huangshan Biodiversity and Tibetan Macaque Behavioral Ecology Anhui, China School of Life Sciences Hefei Normal University Hefei, Anhui, China Peter M. Kappeler Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Unit, German Primate Center Leibniz Institute for Primate Research Göttingen, Germany Department of Anthropology/Sociobiology University of Göttingen Göttingen, Germany ISSN 2509-6745 ISSN 2509-6753 (electronic) Fascinating Life Sciences ISBN 978-3-030-27919-6 ISBN 978-3-030-27920-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27920-2 This book is an open access publication. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020, corrected publication 2020 Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Their [Tibetan macaques’] flat, broad, bearded faces provide perhaps the most humanlike countenance I have ever seen in a monkey.... Apart from chimpanzees, I had never seen primate males so intensely involved with each other. In chimpanzees, too, males are at the same time rivals and friends, and I would argue the same for human males. —Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master (2001) Foreword Mystery surrounded Tibetan macaques for a long time, even for experts. The species was not identified until the last third of the nineteenth century, and nothing more than its geographic distribution and external characters were known for the next hundred years. It was long referred to as Père David’s macaque, a rather odd name in reference to the French missionary and naturalist Father Armand David, who first collected the species. Moreover, the current name, Tibetan macaque, is misleading since the species is typically found in east-central China and not within the bound- aries of Tibet. This is due to the fact that Père David initially located the species at a place close to the Sino-Tibetan border of his time. We had to wait until the 1980s to see Mount Emei and Mount Huangshan come to light on the primatology map. This is where Qikun Zhao and Ziyun Deng from the Kunming Institute of Zoology and Qishan Wang and Jinhua Li from Anhui Univer- sity began to study the behavior and life history of Tibetan macaques, definitively adding a new dimension to the macaque landscape. I still have the reprints of their publications in my bibliography, some written in Chinese. The works of Hideshi Ogawa, Carol Berman, and a new generation of primatologists soon followed. Now appears this multi-authored volume entirely devoted to the Tibetan macaque. This combined effort of two dozen scientists to review 40 years of research and present new findings about a single species should be viewed as a celebration of the species. It frees Tibetan macaques from the purgatory of scientific papers scattered across various journals and collections to join the small club of primate species that are honored with this attention. Many people would consider that brown monkeys like Tibetan macaques all look similar. Although they do not have the immediate visual appeal of more brightly colored primates, brown monkeys have different but equally attractive assets. With their fiery gaze and prominent beards, Tibetan macaques are no exception, and their adaptations and behaviors attract a great deal of research interest. As scientists we are expected to test hypotheses and theories. Some of the contributors to this book do so, addressing broad issues such as cooperative strate- gies, social dynamics, collective decisions, feeding ecology, and pathogen transmis- sion. They use Tibetan macaques as a model to investigate mainstream research vii viii Foreword questions in the field of behavioral ecology and evolution. Every animal species has its singularities, however, and deserves to be studied for itself. This is why other contributors seek to identify what makes Tibetan macaques special, investigating patterns such as social play, call types, or the fascinating “bridging” interactions in which infants play a role as buffers to reduce tension between adults. Science generally values the testing of general theories more than the humble seeking of what gives a species its own touch. In the end, however, both of these approaches are necessary. Years ago, I was struggling to rank the different species of macaque according to their levels of social tolerance. Quantitative measures were available in a limited number of species and I had to rely on qualitative data for others. I remember asking Qikun Zhao about the behaviors particular to Tibetan macaques at a conference held in Japan in 1996. I was trying to guess their social style, i.e., their own touch. This resulted in a tentative scaling of macaque species which would later be amended when quantitative data became available in Tibetan macaques. It should be emphasized that the story is far from over. As discussed in the book, why and to what extent the different behavioral traits constituting social styles may covary during the evolutionary process still remains to be elucidated. I am delighted to see how the study of the particular meets the general by yielding new perspectives and hypotheses to be tested. As the editors point out, this book should not be considered an end, but rather a beginning. This highlighting of research into Tibetan macaques has the potential to strengthen Chinese primatology and favor its development at the national and international level. It may in turn help the Tibetan macaques. Like other species of non-human primates, their populations are threatened by the loss and fragmentation of their habitat. Admiring, knowledge, and conservation should go hand in hand to save the future of this unique species. University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg Bernard Thierry France The original version of the book frontmatter was revised: For detailed information please see Correction. The correction to the book frontmatter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3- 030-27920-2_15 Preface This book is mainly based on research papers presented in a spirited international primatology symposium held in the scenic area of Mt. Huangshan, China, in the summer of 2017. The chapters were grouped into five logical parts. Part I consists of a single chapter, which offers a brief introduction to recent developments in Chinese primatology and a short history of research on the primates of China in general and the Tibetan macaque in particular. Part II contains seven chapters (Chaps. 2–8) focusing on social behavior and social dynamics in Tibetan macaques. In Chap. 2, Jin-Hua Li and Peter M. Kappeler provide a comprehensive review of three decades of field research in Tibetan macaques at the Valley of Monkeys, highlighting the significance of this species as a model for understanding broader questions in primate behavior and evolution. Lixing Sun, Dong-Po Xia, and Jin-Hua Li follow up in Chap. 3 by introducing a new way to analyze the dynamics of macaque social hierarchy from a social mobility perspective with new insights unveiled through comparing Tibetan macaques with Japanese macaques.