Captive Siamang's and Matching

I recently conducted another observational study; of Siamang's at Adelaide Zoo. Again this study was aimed at observing any imitative behaviour between mother and infant. I was priviledged to spend 3 days with these acrobats of the jungle! Despite losing one day of data due to an Orangutan escape, I was intrigued to find matching in Siamang's for a tiny infant only 3 months of age! These creatures continue to surprise me. It was much more difficult to keep up with them, given my ancient video camera! It was most interesting that I found the infant opening and closing its mouth spontaneously when the mother chewed on food. This was a rare sight and only occured on 1 or 2 occasions. I would need to do a longer study to verify these findings. I hope to be replicating these studies again end of July, beginning of August! Keep posted.

Evidence of dancing in birds...

Despite this blog being predominantly relating to primates, last year I gave a presentation relating to the autopomorphy of humans being able to dance and keep to a beat. I did argue that no other species have been found to dance in tempo with a partner for recreation. I think part of this argument still stands as no other species do partner dance. However, there is new evidence that birds dance to the beat, so despite there being no evidence for partner dancing this is really an amazing discovery. Indeed, it is suggested that it is linked to vocal learning and mimicry. Is it absence of evidence or evidence of absence? Indeed, why would they need to partner dance, and is recreation potentially a human autopomorphy? It depends on how recreation is defined, indeed, this warrants an in-depth discussion beyond a blog post. Nevertheless, a great discussion point!

http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0430-hance_birddance.html