The Journal of Zoology love tarsiers

Everyone loves a tarsier (except Rob). As it turns out Journal of Zoology love them too, and we are in. It is my first ‘official’ proper journal publication and to be honest I’m too scared to actually read the online version in case I’ve made an horrific error….tarsiers are primates right?

So, I guess that makes me a scientist. I am off to get one of these outfits to make it official:

http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-reviewers-rip-sexy-phd-costume/

 

Anyway here’s the link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jzo.12203/abstract

Enjoy.

Tiny new tarsier subspecies found in the Philippines.

http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/tiny-tarsier-subspecies-discovered

Some Gratuitous Videos of Animals Doing Stuff.

What's In John's Freezer?

Title says it all? Sometimes a spade needs to be called a spade.

From time to time the Structure & Motion Lab at the RVC gets cool videos of animals doing different behaviours, be that slow-mo/high-speed videos, x-ray videos. motion capture or whatever. Actually, we get cool videos pretty much every day but some of them (such as a racehorse galloping on a treadmill) seem mundane to us, much as our visitors are impressed.

Here are some examples of the stuff we’ve filmed recently. It all seems to belong on this blog as an example of anatomy in motion, but has no good home here otherwise and no other cohesive threads uniting the disparate videos.

Hence the title. Enjoy!

The above two videos were made by Renate Weller, Emily Sparkes and others. Looping GIF of the last one, via Marko Bosscher:

Shin-Ichi Fujiwara, myself and others made that video some years ago…

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Cheeky little article.

The world needs to know more about tarsiers, and luckily we can now find them with relative ease (and a computer).

http://www.biodiversityscience.com/2012/09/26/forest-disturbance-buton-tarsier/

Tarsier call

Tarsier call

And for those wondering what a tarsier (or the jungle at dawn) sounds like…..

Imagine a puppy with a squeaky toy.

Geographic profiling and tarsiers

The Spectral Tariser. (Photo credit: Callum Pearson, Opwall 2013)

So, this is exciting – thesis has been submitted, and we are currently working on publishing the exciting paper on what I did this summer. What did I do this summer I hear you cry….? Well, I used techniques commonly used within the realms of criminology, techniques that have been adapted to locating serial killers, serial arsonists and such like – and applied these to locating tarsier sleeping sites. AND IT WORKED. Geographic profiling is an analytical tool developed for use within criminology. Here, it uses the spatial locations of connected crimes (such as serial rape, arson or murder) to predict the areas that will most likely include the criminals residence. This has been very successful within the field it was created for, and is widely used on a global scale, by police forces and investigative agencies. More recently this method has been applied to biological data sets such animal foraging patterns, white shark dispersal patterns, invasive species and epidemiology. GP was developed originally to solve the problem of information overload when dealing with cases of serial crime. It is a methodology that looks at the locations of connected crimes to determine the most probable anchor point (work place or home for example) for that criminal. Investigations often result in large numbers of tip-offs, and large numbers of suspects rather than too few. Time and financial constraints will impede most investigations if every suspect has to be scrutinised. In the 1980’s, police investigating the case of the Yorkshire Ripper accrued 268,000 suspect names and 5.4 million vehicle registration numbers. Clearly time constraints in this case meant that investigating each suspect would be unrealistic. Human hunting behaviour observed in criminals involves searching and choosing a victim, method of attack by the offender and a target location. These behaviours are consistent with animals’ hunting and foraging behaviours, so applying criminology methodologies to ecological studies is a logical and valid step.

We all know I really like tarsiers, I do and I am not advocating that they are in fact murderous little primates with a seedy and disturbed nocturnal lifestyle. Although I haven’t yet shown that this is not the case. But I ‘simply’ used their calls as effectively crimes sites and using very complicated mathematics and a whole world of computer code I could then identify the location of their sleeping trees.

I certainly had nothing to do with the writing of the code (full credit goes to Dr. Steve LeComber, Dr. Mark Stevenson and Dr. Bob Verity of QMUL), as there are days when I can barely turn the computer on. But I tottered back from the jungle full of GPS coordinates and plugged then into  Rgeoprofile ((http://evolve.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/lecomber). With A LOT of help from Dr. Steve Le Comber in particular whilst I was demonstrating (and we were eating cake) on a small island in Scotland, the models were produced and as if by magic (because it really seemed that way to me – coding is complicated) we produced beautiful geoprofiles. These are effectively a probability surfaces whereby every location on the geoprofile will have a probability attached to it of there being a source site (sleeping tree) there. The model found 10 of the 26 known sleeping sites by searching less than 5% of the total area. In addition the model located all but one of the sleeping sites by searching less than 15% of the area.

SE Asia, specifically Sulawesi houses a huge number of endemic species, and often habitat assessments of cryptic and elusive animals such as the tarsier are overlooked, primarily due to the difficulties of locating them in challenging habitats. The ability to accurately and reliably detect individuals as a basis for – subsequent assessments of population growth, density and other variables is crucial for developing an understanding of change within populations and developing plans for management of both species and their habitat. Traditional assessment techniques are often limited by time constraints, costs and challenging logistics of certain habitats. In particular difficulties arise when studying elusive species with cryptic behaviours.

So there you go, a shortened rather disjointed and probably unclear version of my thesis. But a version nonetheless, and another beautiful photo of the weird and wonderful tarsier.

Vote me on “Young Caring Professional Award 2013”

Everyone please vote for Felicia….she is amazing, and a well deserved finalist!

Felicia Lasmana

Never thought would be the 1 from 20 finalist of YCPA 2013. I am considering myself very lucky and definitely ready to learn and reap many knowledge from this event. Really grateful when Cika, a friend from undergraduate school was telling me about this award in the right time before the closing registration date. Okay, I will let you know anything about this award later but for now …

1st: Click https://www.facebook.com/caringcolours.ycpa and LIKE (suggest best view for clicking on laptop)
2nd: On the App Page https://apps.facebook.com/caringcolor/
Click THE FINALIST > PAGE 3 > MY PHOTO > VOTES
Get also awesome prize for the most creative comment on my vote page!
Thanks very much for your help and please promote me to other friends as well

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Bill Bailey on Sulawesi

Tarsiers featured at 7mins…..ruthless little killers!

Hati Hati

4 days to go…and Flop is not exactly enamoured by the fact that I am leaving her. That is most definitely an angry face.

With over 6 months preparation time, some might expect me to be more prepared than I actually am. But then I guess those people don’t know me all that well. It seems, regarding this project  over the last month I have prioritised; buying a motorbike on the island, bought significant amounts of waterproof bags and harem pants, not to mention copious amounts of socks. What I have failed to organise is a visa, working out how to use my equipment, getting some equipment or coming up with a succinct plan in general. Welcome to my world! I have faith that all this can be arranged on Monday (don’t panic Dave). It’s actually not as bad as it seems and under this facade of chaos I seem to be actually in control. And if I’m not it doesn’t matter, I will own a motorbike on Buton and have some hippy trousers.

For those who have ever wondered, Buton is located here: http://goo.gl/maps/zs3kp

So, if anyone needs to find me…..that is where I shall be.

Overall the island is 4,408 square kilometres in area, and actually is one of only two places in the world where wild Anoa can be found, the other being mainland Sulawesi. I have never seen one, but it would be an honour one day to do so. Maybe this year….

 

It is hard to imagine that wild cows roam the forest, last year it was bad enough coming across a 5m python, but to disturb one of these on our 3am rambling tarsier hunts would be quite terrifying.

Speaking of terrifying….

On a more serious note, there is reasoning behind the months we spend in the jungle, fending off leeches and bird eating spiders. Across the whole of the tropics unsustainable agriculture and deforestation is occurring at a remarkable rate, with predictions that this is set to continue at an ever increasing rate. There are schemes which work closely with industries to try and preserve biodiversity but yet maintain certain profit margins. In order for these schemes to be viable, accurate assessments of ecological communities needs to be collected. The more efficient these collection methods are, the less time consuming and more cost efficient they become.

Global governments and NGOs set aside large sums of money to try and protect the global biodiversity by maintaining habitats within selected areas of forests. Whilst this is admirable in itself, it is often presumed that these protected forest reserves and national parks will remain intact and preserved for species to live there. It has been suggested that this present day policy on preventing loss of biodiversity is not effective by itself and that all forests will erode over time through natural occurrences and through anthropogenic activities regardless of their protection status. In order to mitigate these losses a full understanding of the biodiversity and ecosystems must be maintained along with these protected forest reserves.

Advances in technology, allow remote methods to be used to obtain a reliable estimate of biodiversity. These include, using camera traps and acoustic technology. For massive technophobes like me, this becomes a slight nightmare. But a very rewarding experience….. Check this out from last year:

http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/478872/view

This year I am planning on looking at tarsier acoustics and seeing how they may change across different landscapes. BUT importantly I have added a little extra, with the help of Dr. Steve Le Comber and Mark Stevenson. Geographic profiling has been used to locate criminals, by using the locations of a series of connected crimes and some complicated statistics. If it is good enough for Jack the Ripper and the Gestapo then it is good enough for the tarsiers of Buton. Now, we are not saying that tarsiers are murders (although they are the only solely carnivorous primate), but we are going to try and apply this technique to locate tarsier sleeping sites. Easy! I’m just glad I am not doing the mathematics on this one…..or am I? L

 

Things everyone should know about tarsiers……

Always eat your vegetables…..