Primate Coloration: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

Color plays a significant role in the ecology and behavior of many animal species, including in food detection and foraging, intraspecific signaling, predator detection, and camouflage. However, understanding the role of color in the lives of animals offers many challenges, as animal coloration sits at the boundary between chemistry (the chemical basis and properties of colors exhibited and encountered), physics (the composition and structure of light, and physical patterns of reflection and absorption), and numerous aspects of animal biology. As such, color and its perception are at the interface between an animal’s behavioral and sensory ecology and the wider physical environment. Primates are the most colorful group of mammals, and many species display striking sexual dimorphism in pelage, facial, and anogenital skin coloration. The range of colors exhibited by primates of diverse taxa suggests the importance of color in primate behavior and social signaling, but empirical studies of primate color were rare until relatively recently. Primate coloration research has lagged behind work conducted on other taxa such as fish, birds, insects, and reptiles in the number of studies of adaptive function, as well as in the sophistication of the methods used to overcome the inherent problems of color quantification, and in the appreciation of differences in the sensory systems with which animals detect and interpret color. The limited ability to conduct controlled experiments on primates, and the obstacles of studying colorful primates that often live in wet, dark forests (making the use of photographic equipment difficult), have provided further challenges to color research in this group. Int J Primatol (2009) 30:749–751 DOI 10.1007/s10764-009-9381-y