Browsing by Author "Nunn, Charles"

Now showing items 1-20 of 32

    • The 10kTrees Website: A New Online Resource for Primate Phylogeny 

      Arnold, Christian; Matthews, Luke J.; Nunn, Charles Lindsay (John Wiley & Sons, 2010)
      The comparative method plays a central role in efforts to uncover the adaptive basis for primate behaviors, morphological traits, and cognitive abilities.[1-4] The comparative method has been used, for example, to infer ...

    • Community Structure and the Spread of Infectious Disease in Primate Social Networks 

      Griffin, Randi Heesoo; Nunn, Charles Lindsay (Springer Netherlands, 2011)
      Living in a large social group is thought to increase disease risk in wild animal populations, but comparative studies have provided mixed support for this prediction. Here, we take a social network perspective to investigate ...

    • Comparative Chewing Efficiency in Mammalian Herbivores 

      Fritz, Julia; Hummel, Jürgen; Kienzle, Ellen; Arnold, Christian; Nunn, Charles Lindsay; Clauss, Marcus (Nordic Ecological Society, 2009)
      Although the relevance of particle size reduction in herbivore digestion is widely appreciated, few studies have investigated digesta particle size across species in relation to body mass or digestive strategy. We investigated ...

    • Do Transmission Mechanisms or Social Systems Drive Cultural Dynamics in Socially Structured Populations? 

      Nunn, Charles Lindsay; Thrall, Peter H.; Bartz, Kevin; Dasgupta, Tirthankar; Boesch, Christophe (Elsevier, 2009)
      Cultural traits spread via multiple mechanisms among individuals within social groups, including via transmission biases that occur when subordinates copy from dominants (prestige transmission), or via common cultural trait ...

    • Does Sleep Play a Role in Memory Consolidation? A Comparative Test 

      Capellini, Isabella; McNamara, Patrick; Preston, Brian T.; Nunn, Charles; Barton, Robert A. (Public Library of Science, 2009)
      Sleep is a pervasive characteristic of mammalian species, yet its purpose remains obscure. It is often proposed that ‘sleep is for the brain’, a view that is supported by experimental studies showing that sleep improves ...

    • Effects of the Distribution of Female Primates on the Number of Males 

      Carnes, Laurel Mariah; Nunn, Charles Lindsay; Lewis, Rebecca J. (Public Library of Science, 2011)
      The spatiotemporal distribution of females is thought to drive variation in mating systems, and hence plays a central role in understanding animal behavior, ecology and evolution. Previous research has focused on investigating ...

    • Evidence for a Tradeoff Between Retention Time and Chewing Efficiency in Large Mammalian Herbivores 

      Clauss, Marcus; Nunn, Charles Lindsay; Fritz, Julia; Hummel, Jürgen (Elsevier, 2009)
      Large body size is thought to produce a digestive advantage through different scaling effects of gut capacity and food intake, with supposedly longer digesta retention times in larger animals. However, empirical tests of ...

    • Examining Landscape Factors Influencing Relative Distribution of Mosquito Genera and Frequency of Virus Infection 

      Junglen, S.; Kurth, A.; Kuehl, H.; Quan, P. L.; Ellerbrok, H.; Pauli, G.; Nitsche, A.; Nunn, Charles Lindsay; Rich, S. M.; Lipkin, W. I.; Briese, T.; Leendertz, F. H. (Springer Verlag, 2009)
      Mosquito-borne infections cause some of the most debilitating human diseases, including yellow fever and malaria, yet we lack an understanding of how disease risk scales with human-driven habitat changes. We present an ...

    • Female Reproductive Synchrony Predicts Skewed Paternity Across Primates 

      Ostner, Julia; Nunn, Charles Lindsay; Schülke, Oliver (Oxford University Press, 2008)
      Recent studies have uncovered remarkable variation in paternity within primate groups. To date, however, we lack a general understanding of the factors that drive variation in paternity skew among primate groups and across ...

    • Gap Analysis and the Geographical Distribution of Parasites 

      Hopkins, Mariah, E.; Nunn, Charles Lindsay (Oxford University Press, 2010)
      Sampling biases can have enormous impacts on studies of parasite biogeography. While complete sampling is sometimes possible for local or regional patterns of parasitism, continental and global analyses often rely on data ...

    • Host Longevity and Parasite Species Richness in Mammals 

      Cooper, Natalie; Kamilar, Jason; Nunn, Charles Lindsay (Public Library of Science, 2012-07-20)
      Hosts and parasites co-evolve, with each lineage exerting selective pressures on the other. Thus, parasites may influence host life-history characteristics, such as longevity, and simultaneously host life-history may ...

    • Investigating the Impact of Observation Errors on the Statistical Performance of Network-based Diffusion Analysis 

      Franz, Mathias; Nunn, Charles Lindsay (Springer Verlag, 2010)
      Experiments in captivity have provided evidence for social learning, but it remains challenging to demon- strate social learning in the wild. Recently, we developed network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA; 2009) as a new ...

    • Modeling Imitation and Emulation in Constrained Search Spaces 

      Acerbi, Alberto; Tennie, Claudio; Nunn, Charles Lindsay (Psychonomic Society, 2011)
      Social transmission of behavior can be realized through distinct mechanisms. Research on primate social learning typically distinguishes two forms of information that a learner can extract from a demonstrator: copying ...

    • Mutualism or Parasitism? Using a Phylogenetic Approach to Characterize the Oxpecker-Ungulate Relationship 

      Nunn, Charles Lindsay; Ezenwa, Vanessa O.; Arnold, Christian; Koenig, Walter D. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
      With their striking predilection for perching on African ungulates and eating their ticks, yellow-billed (Buphagus africanus) and red-billed oxpeckers (B. erythrorhynchus) represent one of the few potentially mutualistic ...

    • Network-based Diffusion Analysis: A New Method for Detecting Social Learning 

      Mathias, Franz; Nunn, Charles (The Royal Society, 2009)
      Social learning has been documented in a wide diversity of animals. In free-living animals, however, it has been difficult to discern whether animals learn socially by observing other group members or asocially by ...

    • Non-Invasive Body Temperature Measurement of Wild Chimpanzees Using Fecal Temperature Decline 

      Jensen, Siv Aina; Mundry, Roger; Nunn, Charles Lindsay; Boesch, Christophe; Leendertz, Fabian H. (Wildlife Disease Association, 2009)
      New methods are required to increase our understanding of pathologic processes in wild mammals. We developed a noninvasive field method to estimate the body temperature of wild living chimpanzees habituated to humans, ...

    • On Sexual Dimorphism in Immune Function 

      Nunn, Charles; Lindenfors, Patrik; Pursall, E. Rhiannon; Rolff, Jens (The Royal Society, 2009)
      Sexual dimorphism in immune function is a common pattern in vertebrates and also in a number of invertebrates. Most often, females are more ‘immunocompetent’ than males. The underlying causes are explained by either the ...

    • Parasite resistance and the adaptive significance of sleep 

      Preston, Brian T.; Capellini, Isabella; McNamara, Patrick; Barton, Robert A.; Nunn, Charles (Biomed Central, 2009)
      Background: Sleep is a biological enigma. Despite occupying much of an animal's life, and having been scrutinized by numerous experimental studies, there is still no consensus on its function. Similarly, no hypothesis has ...

    • Parasite-Mediated Evolution of the Functional Part of the MHC in Primates 

      Garamszegi, Laszlo Z.; Nunn, Charles Lindsay (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
      The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is a key model of genetic polymorphism, but the mechanisms underlying its extreme variability are debated. Most hypotheses for MHC diversity focus on pathogen-driven selection and ...

    • Phylogenetic Rate Shifts in Feeding Time During the Evolution of Homo 

      Organ, Chris Lee; Nunn, Charles Lindsay; Machanda, Zarin Pearl; Wrangham, Richard W. (National Academy of Sciences, 2011)
      Unique among animals, humans eat a diet rich in cooked and nonthermally processed food. The ancestors of modern humans who invented food processing (including cooking) gained critical advantages in survival and fitness ...