Primates [antikvár]

Over the past five years, and especially since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1993, conservation of biological diversity, the sum total of all life on our planet, has finally taken its rightful place on the global stage. A Biodiversity Convention, a major World Bank-based Global Environmental Facility focusing heavily on biodiversity, and a growing number of foundations and conservation organizations with biodiversity as their principal objective have raised the profile of this key issue and channeled funding in its direction. The entire planet's biodiversity is of great importance, but clearly certain groups of species and a small number of particularly rich ecosystems, mainly in the tropics, deserve special attention. Among these are the nonhuman primates, the monkeys, apes, lemurs, lorises, galagos, and tar-siers that are our closest living relatives. Not only are these animals intriguing unto themselves, they occupy a very special position in the imagination of our own primate species, Homo sapiens. As research over the past four decades has shown, nonhuman primates can teach us a great deal about ourselves and our evolution. For example, they have played an important, if highly controversial, role in biomedical research since the development of the polio vaccine in the 1950s, and they have been critical in helping us to understand what early humans must have been like. The continuing growth of primatology and primate-oriented anthropological research clearly demonstrates that our interest in our closest relatives is not likely to wane anytime soon. Aside from the ways in which primates can enlighten us about ourselves, primate field research has intrinsic value—it provides valuable information relevant to tropical ecology. About 90 percent of all primates are found in the world's tropical rain forests. These habitats are the richest and most diverse terrestrial ecosystems, and the primates living in them play a very important role, as seed dispersers, seed predators, and even pollinators. The role of larger rain forest species like the Amazonian spider and woolly monkeys as seed dispersers seems to be especially critical to the maintenance of forest structure and diversity.