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What does variation in primate behavior mean?
Author(s) -
Strier Karen B.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
american journal of physical anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 119
eISSN - 1096-8644
pISSN - 0002-9483
DOI - 10.1002/ajpa.23143
Subject(s) - intraspecific competition , variation (astronomy) , extinction (optical mineralogy) , psychological resilience , interspecific competition , population , biology , normative , evolutionary biology , ecology , primate , phylogenetic tree , psychology , demography , social psychology , sociology , paleontology , philosophy , physics , epistemology , astrophysics , biochemistry , gene
Interest in intraspecific behavioral variation has grown with concerns about the ability of primates to adapt to the rapidly changing ecological and demographic conditions that threaten their survival. Now, in addition to identifying the causes and phylogenetic distribution of normative, species‐specific behavior patterns for interspecific comparisons, there is widespread recognition of the need to incorporate intraspecific variation. This variation is evident across groups and populations of the same species as well over the long histories of single groups of long‐lived, socially complex animals with overlapping generations. Yet, analyses of both cross‐sectional and longitudinal data require explicit criteria about how to classify and interpret behavioral variation, and must be sensitive to the limitations of space‐for‐time substitutions in these comparisons. Current approaches have made great advances, but there remains an urgent challenge of understanding intraspecific variation in a way that will facilitate the development of new predictive models to assess population resilience and extinction risks in the face of climate change and other anthropogenic influences.