Ecotax Announcement Department of Biological Sciences Seminar The National University of Singapore

"Fruits, fingers and form: New views on Anthropoid origins"

Nathaniel Dominy
NIH Post-doctoral fellow,
Department of Ecology and Evolution,
University of Chicago

Friday, 29th August 2003: 4.00pm - 5.00pm

Lecture Theatre 20
(between Blocks S3 & S4)
Faculty of Science,
The National University of Singapore
Science Drive 3

Visitors may park at Carpark 10
See map

Host: A/P Hugh Tan

About the Talk
"The skill of anthropoid forelimbs is unparalleled among vertebrates. Classic evolutionary hypotheses stress the importance of insect capture or terminal-branch foraging. Here I extend these hypotheses and suggest that increased anthropoid dexterity evolved principally to evaluate fruit texture.

I examined this hypothesis with respect to three anthropoids and the spectral, mechanical, and chemical properties of dietary fruits in Kibale Forest, Uganda. Additional fruits were studied during a general mast-fruiting event in the Pasoh Forest Reserve, Peninsular Malaysia. I distinguish between seasonal fruits and figs, which may offer critical sustenance during periods of fruit dearth. It is shown that the perceptual cue eliciting fruit ingestion is not color or size - cues viewed historically as essential to primate frugivory - but fruit mechanical properties, which alone predict sugar concentration. These results reject the role of fruits in the evolution of catarrhine color vision and instead emphasize the importance of evolving independently mobile digits coupled with neural specializations in the cortex and skin. These hallmark adaptations were indispensable in the Eocene, an epoch when stem anthropoids were faced with a coterie of confusing fruit colors already adapted to consumption by diurnal birds or nocturnal frugivores, such as flying foxes. Accordingly, the evolution of trichromatic color vision in Old World monkeys and apes likely results from a switch to young leaves as a fallback resource during the Eocene-Oligocene transition."

About the speaker
Nathaniel Dominy is an NIH Post-doctoral fellow with the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. He received his PhD from the Department of Anatomy, Faculty of Medicine, University of Hong Kong was B.A. cum laude, Anthropology and English Literature with departmental honors, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.

His research interests are in the areas of sensory perception, biological anthropology, evolutionary ecology, anatomy, trichromatic color vision, plant-animal interactions and the tropics.

 
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