Advancing the Study of South American Primates

Abstract

Given the recent publication of several texts offering a comprehensive review of the behavior and ecology of each genus or major taxonomic group of New World primates (Campbell et al. 2007: Barnett et al. in press, Ford et al. in press), our goals in developing this volume are (1) to test and evaluate recent theories of sexual selection, population genetics, socioecology, predation risk, ontogeny and life history, reproductive endocrinology, foraging strategies, cognition and problem-solving, and conservation biology based on data derived from studies of South American primates, (2) to produce a resource of important scholarly information and intellectual encouragement for the expanding set of South American scientists with interests in primatology, tropical ecology, evolutionary biology, and conservation (more than half of the contributors to this volume are from Latin America), and (3) to encourage researchers focusing on similar or related theoretical issues in other animal taxa including avians, chiropterans, rodents, carnivores, and in particular, Old World primates to expand their use of the published literature on South American primates to inform their studies. For example, based on a review of 60 randomly selected research articles published between 2005 and 2007 in 15 issues of the American Journal of Primatology (Table 1.1), only 8.9% of the citations in studies of prosimians, 7.5% of the citations in studies of Old World monkeys, and less than 4% of the citations in studies of apes refer to the relevant literature on New World primates. Although, it is possible that this could be explained by the fact that publications on New World primates are under-represented in the literature, this is not the case. Of the total number of taxonomically-oriented research articles published in these 15 journal issues, 34% were on New World monkeys, 19.3% on prosimians, 20.4% on Old World monkeys, and 26.1% on apes. In addition, given that two forthcoming volumes on South American primates focus exclusively on the callitrichids (Ford et al.) and Pitheciines (Barnett et al.) a major challenge of this volume is to highlight