Including valuable advice for those planning a field study, this practical manual for students and researchers studying wild primates provides essential information concerning the technical and practical aspects of field and laboratory methods. The study covers surveys and habituation, remote sensing and GPS, tracking and trapping, non-invasive genetic and endocrine assays, and ethical issues. It will be appropriate for final year undergraduates, postgraduate students and researchers in primatology, behavioral ecology and zoology.

Infanticide in the natural world might be a relatively rare event, but as Amanda Rees shows, it has enormously significant consequences. Identified in the 1960s as a phenomenon worthy of investigation, infanticide had, by the 1970s, become the focus of serious controversy. The suggestion, by Sarah Hrdy, that it might be the outcome of an evolved strategy intended to maximize an individual’s reproductive success sparked furious disputes between scientists, disagreements that have continued down to the present day. Meticulously tracing the history of the infanticide debates, and drawing on extensive interviews with field scientists, Rees investigates key theoretical and methodological themes that have characterized field studies of apes and monkeys in the twentieth century. As a detailed study of the scientific method and its application to field research, The Infanticide Controversy sheds new light on our understanding of scientific practice, focusing in particular on the challenges of working in “natural” environments, the relationship between objectivity and interpretation in an observational science, and the impact of the public profile of primatology on the development of primatological research. Most importantly, it also considers the wider significance that the study of field science has in a period when the ecological results of uncontrolled human interventions in natural systems are becoming ever more evident.

Product Description: Approximately 572 participants from 39 countries attended this congress, with a dramatic increase in participants from developing countries. With the exception of Japan, the developing world forms the natural environment of primates, and captive primates still form an ecological and financial problem not only because of their being outwith their natural environment, but also in their social behaviour...read more

Pp. xxiv, 980; numerous text-figures (charts, graphs and some photos). Publisher's original orange cloth, lettered in gilt on the spine, blue pictorial dust jacket, thick sm 4to. The papers in this volume are based on the papers presented at four symposia at the Sixth Congress of the International Society held at the University of Cambridge in August, 1976. The volume contains 150 different papers divided into nine sections. This mammoth work that presents a cross-section of the primate behavioral research as it was known in the 1970s. No ownership marks and no signs of use.

Product Description: Primates; Zoology & animal sciences

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