Tag: mates

Study: Primates Become Chubby Hubbies

Some human males claim they gain weight when their mates are pregnant. A new study documents a weight gain for some kinds of monkeys when they’re about to be fathers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach
reports:

Transcript

Some human males claim they gain weight when their mates are
pregnant. A new study documents a weight gain for some kinds of
monkeys when they’re about to be fathers. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:


Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison weighed about sixty
cotton-top tamarins, and common marmosets during the study. Those
two squirrel-sized primates are known to be monogamous and good
parents.


Researchers found the male monkeys gained another ten percent in
weight when their partners were expecting. Endocrinologist Toni Ziegler
speculates that hormonal changes help the expectant fathers to bulk up
and prepare to lug around their babies.


“There’s a high energetic cost to being the one which these fathers are to
do most of the infant carrying and since they have twins and sometimes
triplets it’s a big responsibility.”


Ziegler says the additional weight only stays on the male monkeys
during the pregnancy… something their human counterparts can only
hope for.


For the GLRC, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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Birders Keep an Eye Out for Vagrants

  • Some hummingbirds have been showing up in places where they're not normally found. Cornell University is trying to recruit birders to help them collect sightings of birds outside their range. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

Bird lovers nationwide are being asked to report “vagrants” in their neighborhoods. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner explains:

Transcript

Bird lovers nationwide are being asked to report “vagrants” in their neighborhoods. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner explains:


Bird researchers at Cornell University have a special request this winter: they’re asking their nationwide network of bird watchers to report vagrants – birds that show up in places they’re not normally found. David Bonter is head of Project FeederWatch at Cornell.


He says birds that drift outside their normal range can indicate a natural shift in bird distribution or it could be a sign there’s a problem with the species. Bonter says in recent years, there have been a lot of reports of hummingbirds that breed west of the Rocky Mountains showing up at feeders in the Southeast and Midwest.


“These are birds that, historically, have never been in Eastern North America and they’re showing up here at feeders in the winter time, when historically, they’d be wintering in Mexico or points south.”


Bonter says calls bird vagrancy a biological dead end, because most don’t find mates in their new environment.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Erin Toner.

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