Category: primates

Readers’ wildlife photographs

December 9, 2018 • 7:45 am

Joe Dickinson found some photos he’d sent me but I never put up (this happens sometimes due to the volume of my email). I herewith apologize and present Joe’s photos and narrative (his captions are indented):

Here is a fourth set (previously misplaced) from my 2012 trip to Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia in south central Africa.

This female yellow baboon (Papio cyanocephalus) provides a comfortable and secure seat for “Junior” while she forages.  I don’t know whether she provided the shoot that Junior finds so intriguing.

This a male of the same species.

Obviously, here are some hippopotami (Hippopotamus amphibius).

More elephants (Loxodonta africanus).

And a couple of young elephants apparently having a good deal of fun in some mud.

We were excited to get even a brief sighting of a Cape hunting dog (Lycaeon rictus). Interesting that it is not included in the genus Canis.

And yet the black-backed jackal (Canis mesomelas) is lumped with wolves and domestic dogs.

This is a solitary young male lion (Panthera leo), probably ejected from his natal pride and hanging out alone unless/until he gets a shot at taking over a pride.

Termite mounds, built by managers of the genus Macrotermes, are a ubiquitous feature of African landscapes.

Here is a common warthog (Phacochaerus africanus).

Finally, a pod of hippos:

 

Readers’ wildlife photos (and video)

December 2, 2018 • 7:45 am

It’s time for my sporadic plea for more photographs from readers. While I have about ten sets in reserves, that will last for only a week and a half. If you have good wildlife photos, please send them to me soon.  And thanks to all the photographers who have obliged me in the past!

Reader Rick Longworth sent a lovely video of a hawk. His notes:

This morning we awoke to a blanket of fog. As the sun began to burn through, a handsome young red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) appeared. The temperature was in the 20s and the trees along the river were coated in frost.

Reader pyers sent some photos of Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus) from the Rock of Gibraltar. While the animal is distributed spottily in Morocco and northwest Africa, there’s a colony of 300 individuals (in five troops) inhabiting the rock of Gibraltar. The Gibraltar apes have their own Wikipedia page, and used to be under the care of (indeed, considered part of) the British Army. When I was in graduate school, I made a bet with a fellow graduate student that the apes were indeed given ranks and had a daily roll call by the army. I won the bet, and still have the letter from “the chief officer of ape administration” that I got from Gibraltar.

Here are pyers’s notes:

Caught these whilst at the top of a rather damp Rock of Gibraltar last week. . . Because they are used to humans, it is frequently forgotten that they are wild, free-living animals which will  bite if threatened.   They have  learned to undo rucksack zips, emptying the contents everywhere in the search for food: I had to use my walking cane to loudly tap on the ground to get one of the animals to let go of a tourist’s rucksack !
Last July, pyers also sent a bird photo, which I forgot until now:

A rook – Corvus frugilegus  …….PS: Yes … it is where you think it is !

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 9, 2018 • 8:00 am

In response to my call for photos, reader Joe Dickinson found some six-year-old shots from a trip to Africa. His notes are indented:

Responding to recent requests for more wildlife submissions, I’ve gone to my archives and pulled up photos from my first Africa trip.  Dating from April, 2012, these are from Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia in south central Africa.  This the first of perhaps 6 or 8 sets I’ll put together over the next several days.

I’ll begin with some scenery at spectacular Victoria Falls, featuring wonderful rainbows in the all-enveloping “mist” (actually more like a downpour that killed a camera, fortunately just my backup ).

Here is an up close and personal look at a segment of rainbow.  Have you ever noticed that the sky looks brighter inside a rainbow than outside?  Here you can see streaks produced by falling drops on the concave side but not on the convex side.  And streaks that traverse the bow change color as they do so.

Here is a plains zebra (Equus quagga) nursing a fairly large foal.

We had a ride on an African elephant (Loxodonta africana) in a private game park.  The elephants were free range within the reserve but came when summoned by a bell, presumably because they got treats.

There was an opportunity for meet and greet after the ride.  That’s my wife again and you can see from her name tag that this was another group tour with UC Berkeley (Cal) alumni.

We also had a boat ride (the first of many) on the Zambezi River upstream from the falls.  There were many hippos (Hippopotamus amphibius).

We stayed at a lodge that overlooked the above mentioned game reserve, set on a terrace about eight feet above a nice meadow that was frequented by an assortment of wildlife.  Here is a young elephant that came right up to the terrace wall as we were sitting on our porch with cocktails.

I think this vervet monkey (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) is perched on the roof of one of the Toyota safari vehicles in which we took twice daily game drives.

Banded mongooses (Mungus mungo) were common on the grounds of pretty much every lodge we stayed at.

 

What was the animal that inspired Dr. Seuss’s lorax? Biologists suggest a hypothesis

July 25, 2018 • 10:45 am

The New York Times from two days ago has an article about one of Dr. Seuss’s most famous books, The Lorax (you can see a preview of the book’s contents at the Amazon site). Here’s the article:

And the book at issue:

The book’s plot involves a man called the Once-ler visiting a beautiful forest of Truffula trees inhabited by the Lorax and many other species. Sensing a mercantile opportunity, the Once-ler cuts down the trees to manufacture “Thneed”, apparently a fabric used to make beautiful clothes. The Thneed factory expands, polluting the air and water, and eventually they cut down all the Truffula trees, putting themselves out of business. According to Wikipedia, the story ends like this (I haven’t read it):

Without raw materials, the factory shuts down and the Once-ler’s relatives leave. The Lorax says nothing but with one sad backward glance lifts himself into the air “by the seat of his pants” and disappears behind the smoggy clouds. Where he last stood is a small monument engraved with a single word: “UNLESS”. The Once-ler ponders the message for years, in solitude and self-imposed exile.

In the present, his buildings falling apart around him, the Once-ler at last realizes out loud what the Lorax meant: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” He then gives the boy the last Truffula seed and urges him to grow a forest from it, saying that, if the trees can be protected from logging, then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.

The Lorax was published in 1971, when the U.S. environmental movement was getting underway, with the National Environmental Policy Act passed in January, the first Earth Day celebrated in April, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in December. It was also the year that Joni Mitchell released her musical equivalent of The Lorax, the environmentalist song “Big Yellow Taxi.”

Dr. Seuss, too, was peeved as, according to the New York Times article, he was upset that a development project in San Diego proposed to cut down the eucalyptus trees around his home.

Seuss (real name: Theodore Geisel) wanted to write a children’s book about environmentalism, but got writer’s block, so his wife suggested they chill out at the Mount Kenya Safari Club, a fancy resort with plenty of animals and forest around. That lifted the block, and Seuss wrote most of The Lorax, a perennially popular book (over a million copies sold in 15 languages) in just one afternoon.

Now the book has been impugned for making The Lorax into a domineering and obnoxious sort of environmentalist (“ecopolice”), the argument being that he was the master of the forest and could decree its fate. But a new paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution (reference at bottom, free link here, free pdf here) suggests this interpretation is wrong: the Lorax was really based on two species that are part of Kenya’s ecosystem, and The Lorax simply an animal activist calling for the preservation of entire ecosystems, whose parts are interdependent. (This “reinterpetation” of the book seems to me largely a distinction without a difference, and thus not that exciting, as well as virtually untestable.)

What’s more interesting, as detailed in the paper, is that the Lorax and the Truffula trees might have been inspired by real animals and plants that Seuss saw in Kenya. The authors’ hypothesis is that the Truffula tree is the whistling thorn acacia (Acacia drepanolobium), a tree on which lives the patas monkey (Erythrocebus patas). The monkey gets over 80% of its diet from the gum and leaves of the tree, and the monkey’s depredations don’t hurt the tree. This is then an example of a commensalism: a relationship between two species in which one benefits and the other isn’t harmed. If you wipe out the tree, the monkey goes with it. (As I mention below, this is in fact happening.)

The Truffula trees do look, to the authors, like the spindly whistling thorn acacia. You can see a Truffula above, and here’s the acacia:

Here’s a photo of various parts of the story, including E. patas in the acacia, from the Nature paper:

(From the paper): a, Location of the Mount Kenya Safari Club together with data on the patchy distribution of patas monkeys (E. patas) in Kenya. A comparison of historical records (pre-1996) and surveys between 1996 and 2004 indicates that the range of E. patas has declined by 46% in Kenya24. b, The Lorax in the crown of a silk-tufted Truffula tree. c, Spindly tree that resembles the whistling thorn acacia (A. drepanolobium). d, Male patas monkey; the subspecies in Kenya (E. patas pyrrhonotus) is distinguished by its black facial skin and white nose25. e, Female patas monkey feeding on A. drepanolobium.

 

But what is the lorax? The authors further suggest that the lorax was modeled on E. patas, and test this by using fancy “eigenvalue decomposition methods” to compare the Lorax’s face to that of three primates (see photo below) as well as another Seuss character that looks similar: a “control” creature in The Foot Book. They find that the Lorax clusters with two cercopithecine monkeys: the patas monkey and the blue monkey (C. mitis). The comparison:

(From the paper’s Figure 3): We used a characterized camera19 to photograph every forward-facing image of two Seussian creatures, the Lorax (n = 13) and the bipedal creature in The Foot Book (n = 13). We calculated the mean face of each creature19 and projected it into a space containing the faces of every cercopithecine monkey in Kenya: the patas monkey; the tantalus monkey (Chlorocebus tantalus); the red-tailed monkey (Cercopithecus ascanius); the blue monkey (Cercopithecus mitis); and the De Brazza’s monkey (Cercopithecus neglectus). We used eigenface decomposition methods to calculate facial similarities19 and we generated the plot with t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE)26, an iterative algorithm that down-projects multidimensional information into two dimensions for visualization.

The authors have other “evidence:”

Dates, physical similarities and probable encounters underlie our proposal that patas monkeys inspired the Lorax. His physical appearance postdates Geisel’s trip to Kenya, evolving into a short, “sort of man” with a signature moustache; his mossy pelage was blue before it was orange (Fig. 2). Many of these final traits are shared with patas monkeys and it is probable that Geisel encountered them at the Mount Kenya Safari Club (Fig. 1a). Even the voice of the Lorax (a “sawdusty sneeze”) resembles the ‘whoo-wherr’ vocalization of patas monkeys; the ‘whoo’ is a loud, wheezing expiration of air. It appears to be an alarm call issued in response to predators and human observers.

From this the author’s conclude that “Geisel drew inspiration from a ceropithecine monkey and its ecology” when writing The Lorax in Kenya. That’s possible, although the Lorax is most facially similar to the blue monkey, which is neither blue nor commensal with the acacia, but has a wider diet. If that’s the case, then the similarity between the Truffula tree and the whistling thorn acacia falls apart. The hypothesis is semi-interesting, but there’s no way to test it given the lack of verification from Seuss, and I’m not convinced by the author’s arguments that the lorax is really based on the patas monkey.

I’m even less convinced by the authors’ rewriting of the book’s interpretation, which is almost postmodern:

If this natural commensalism [between acacia and patas monkey] informs The Lorax, it challenges traditional interpretations of the Lorax as an ecopoliceman asserting his authority. If the Lorax is based on the patas monkey, he can be seen as a sustainable consumer dispossessed of his commensal partner and an equal victim of environmental degradation.

Well, yes, all this is as possible as anything else. And the authors do point out that this commensalism is endangered, as the acacia is being heavily browsed by giraffes, rhinos and elephants, and that, combined with its use as charcoal, is bringing the tree toward extinction. Likewise, the range of the patas monkey is said to have “collapsed” recently, so Seuss’s lesson, even if not drawn from this system, still applies: stop destroying ecosystems by removing an important element.

Granted, this short (three-page) paper is in the “books and arts” section of the journal, and it’s a semi-fun read, but to me doesn’t make a convincing case. And I’m not sure why Joanna Klein wrote a longish piece about the paper for The New York Times. The source of the lorax remains, at least to me, a mystery. Whether an eco-policeman or part of an endangered ecosystem, the Lorax has brought joy to children for fifty years.

h/t: Bruce Lyon

_______

N. J. Dominey, S. Winters, D. Pease, and J. P. Higham. 2018. Dr. Seuss and the real Lorax. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2:1196-1198, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0628-x

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 9, 2018 • 8:00 am

Yesterday I put up part I of reader Joe Dickinson’s wildlife photographs from India. Today we have part II, and Joe’s notes are indented. This shows some of the urban wildlife that abounds in India:

Continuing with India, here are shots from diverse locations as specified.

We saw the ring-necked parakeet (Psittacula krameri) many places.  These are one the grounds of the Taj Mahal.

This red-wattled lapwing (Vanellus indicus) was on the grounds of the Jai Mahal Palace Hotel where we stayed on the road from Delhi to Jaipur.

This young Rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) was inside the Agra Fort.

Some bats (species unknown), a palm squirrel (Funambulus palmarum) and a swarm of bees (species unknown) were all at the remarkable carved temples at Kujuraho.  I had to include one of the temples because they are so wonderful. [JAC: see my post on the Khajuraho temples here.]

Here are two more rhesus macaques.  The first, giving a threat display (from which I hastily retreated) is on a trail above the Woodstock School in Mussoorie.  The second, apparently trying to drink from the wrong end of an empty coke bottle, is along the trail to  Surkanda Devi, a popular pilgrimage spot in the Himalaya foothills.

Grey langurs (probably Semnopithecus schistaceus) hang around the Woodstock School.

Finally, a view in evening light from the top of the trail where we encountered the aggressive rhesus.

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 13, 2017 • 7:30 am

Today have a potpourri of photos from four readers.

The first set comes from reader Jim Trice in Australia. Note that the first insect mimics two different models at different stages of its life cycle: ants when young and leaves when older.  The readers’ notes are indented.

I thought I’d send some recent shots for your tank.

The first 2 shots are of the first instar of the gum leaf katydid, Torbia viridissima, from the TETTIGONIIDAE family. At this stage of their life these are ant mimics, and are fairly convincing from a distance.  In close up though those long antennae and back legs give the game away.  As they develop they appear less ant like. The adults rely on camouflage, their wing covers being green, and bearing markings similar to veins on a leaf. I’ve heard reports that these are omnivorous. They eat leaves, but the adults will also eat other insects. Both of these shots were taken in my back yard.

The first of these was taken in strong natural light, the light passing through the insect’s body makes it appear redder than normal. This one has a body length of around 6mm.

The second shot, of a different specimen, was taken with some front on fill-flash. This shows the colour of the insect in more typical lighting. By way of providing a sense of scale each of those spent lavender florets it is sitting on are around 8mm in length.


JAC: Here’s an adult katydid taken from Brisbane Insects; it’s a leaf mimic. Imagine the developmental modifications required to change the morphology of a single individual!

Brisbane Insects has a page with shots of gum leaf katydids at all stages of development, from egg to adult.

The other shots are of a small Australian native bee feeding on Scabious sp. It is Homalictus urbanus, one of the halictid bees, sometimes known as sweat bees. This specimen is about 5mm in length, which is pretty typical for this species.  This is one of the most common, and most widespread, of the Australian native bees.  The females live communally, typically around 80 to 100 females sharing a burrow. But each bee cares for her own young. They like disturbed ground and farmland, and are currently thriving. I found this one while walking my youngest home from school. I was pleasantly surprised it was still there when I rushed back with my camera.



The next shot shows the bee diving in to a floret to feed. I like the way it grips the style with its mid-legs while doing this.



The shot shows the bee cleaning its face. It did this after emerging from every floret.

From reader Charlie Schliesser:

My wife and I trekked to the top of Mt Batur in Bali, Indonesia in late November, the morning that Mt Agung had a large eruption. We climbed up to see the sunrise and were treated not only to the incredible view, but also to a dozen or so macaques that live nearby and follow tourists around at the peak trying to steal a bite to eat (or a camera to trade back). My wife Sara snapped this awesome photo and I want to share it.

From reader Stephen Barnard, a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis):

Finally, a lovely mini-landscape shot by Ken Phelps:

Ice over a shallow pond littered with leaves.

 

A new species of orangutan? I doubt it.

November 3, 2017 • 12:00 pm

Until this week, there were two species of orangutan: the Bornean (Pongo pygmaeus) and the Sumatran (Pongo abelii), living on different islands. These were considered subspecies until 20 years ago, when the measured divergence of their mitochondrial DNA sequences led to them being separated as distinct species.

But now a new paper in Current Biology by Alexander Nater et al. (the “al.s” are numerous: see below for free reference, with the pdf here) adds a third species, P. tapanuliensis, also from Sumatra. Since new great ape species aren’t often described—the last was the Bornean/Sumatran orangs, and before that it was the bonobo, recognized as distinct from the chimp in 1933)—this has gotten a lot of attention, including in the BBC, in Science, and  the Guardian.

But this biologist isn’t going along. Not only do I see this new “species” as merely an isolated and genetically differentiated population (as are many human populations regarded as H. sapiens), but I’d also contend that there is only one species of orangutan overall, with these three groups all being subspecies. Sadly, a lot of systematists don’t see it that way, as they seem to think that any isolated population, if it can be told apart morphologically or genetically from others, warrants being named as a new species. Yet to evolutionists, a “species” is not an arbitrary segment of nature’s continuum, but real entities that maintain their “realness” because they don’t exchange any (or many) genes with other such entities where they cohabit in nature.

On to the paper:

The new species, called the Tapnuli orangutan, as seen in the Guardian’s figure below, occupies only a small patch of forest south of lake Toba, about 1000 km², and numbers only about 800 individuals. They weren’t found until 1997 as the population (endangered due to habitat loss) lies south of the range of P. abelii and was assumed not to harbor orangs. The population is threatened because it’s small and much of the prime habitat is subject to logging.

 

Is this a separate species? While most of the media accept this uncritically, I’m dubious. That’s because the authors base the description on morphological differences and genetic divergence alone (with morphology of the skull based on a single individual, though one that lies outside the ranges of the other species). They give little information on reproductive isolation, and what information they give suggests that the two “species” of Sumatran orang did interbreed. (Data show genetic interchange between the two Sumatran “species” until about 20,000 years ago, when the two groups became completely isolated by the loss of suitable habitat between them.)

What we have, then, is a geographically isolated population of orang that has some morphological difference from the others, some genetic divergence from the others, but has no present opportunity to see if it can interbreed with others when they co-occur in nature: the criterion used in the “biological species concept”. Thus calling P. tapanuliensis a new species is a pure judgment call.  Here are the results of the authors’ analysis:

  • The three orangs are related like this: the Sumatran orang split off from the other two about 3.4 million years ago, so the Tapnuli and Bornean orangs are the most closely related—somewhat surprising as they live on different islands. But the area has been repeatedly sundered by volcanism and sea-level changes over the past several million years, so we don’t know the historical sequence of geographic changes in the ancestor.
  • DNA analysis shows that the  Tapnuli and Bornean orangs diverged about 700,000 years ago: about the same time as the divergence between the modern human and (extinct) Neanderthal lineage. The two populations on Sumatra are, as I said, about 3.4 million years old.
  • The Tapnuli and (northern) Sumatran orangs continued to exchange genes (particularly Y chromosomes, since males are the most mobile sex) up to about 20,000 years ago;  that stopped because the habitat between these two more distantly-related species prevented gene exchange. But clearly these anciently-diverged orangs were capable of hybridizing when they encountered each other, and the hybrids must have been at least partly fertile since Y chromosomes moved between them. It’s likely, then, that the more closely related Tapnuli and Bornean orangs would also be able to successfully hybridize were they to meet. We already know that the Bornean and Sumatran species hybridize well in zoos and produce fertile hybrids (called “cocktail orangutans”).
  • One specimen of Tapnuli orang shot by a local was measured; its cranial dimensions put it outside the range of the other two “species”, so there are likely to be diagnostic differences in the skeletons of this and the other two species, though we need more speciments of P. tapanuliensis.
  • The Tapnuli orangs have a different color and different calls from the other two “species”

So what we have is an isolated population of orangutans that split off about 700,000 years ago from a lineage now inhabiting Borneo. Somewhat isolated from the populations on both Sumatra and Borneo, it accumulated morphological and genetic differences, and possibly difference in vocalization, though these could be cultural?

But is it a new species?

I say no: it’s just an isolated population that’s somewhat different, with individuals being diagnosable. If you use the Biological Species Concept of evolutionists, which deems populations to be different species if they could not produce fertile hybrids when encountering each other in the wild, I’d say that the evidence of interbreeding until physical separation was complete only 20,000 years ago suggests that the Tapnuli and Sumatran orangs are a single species, which also means that the Sumatran and Bornean orangs are a single species as well. My guess would be that the new species would produce fertile hybrids with both of the other “species” in captivity.

If you consider the Tapnuli orang a new species, then you’ll have to consider Neandthals a species different from H. sapiens, for they diverged about 700,000 years ago and also hybridized successfully when they met: that’s why most humans carry some Neanderthal genes—the remnants of that ancient hybridization. Yet Neanderthals are considered by many biologists and anthropologists to be a subspecies of H. sapiens (H. sapiens neanderthalensis vs. H. sapiens sapiens).

If we call every genetically differentiated and diagnosable population a new species, then there’s no end to the mishigass.  We surely don’t call genetically diagnosable populations of humans different species, and yes, if you have enough genes you can diagnose human populations pretty accurately.

Sadly, nearly everyone in the media has uncritically bought into this designation of a new species of great ape—save one scientist quoted in the Guardian:

Dr Andrew Marshall of University of York, said that the study highlighted the importance of conservation, and added that there might even be further species of great ape to be discovered.

But Professor Volker Sommer from University College London was less bowled over, pointing out that there is no clear criteria for what constitutes a new species. “Any bunch of expertised biologists can invent a new species, if they get their arguments together,” he said.

One more point: all the media, as well as the paper itself, emphasize that the new “species” is small in numbers and lives in endangered habitat, and so must in the future be the subject of intensive conservation efforts. Perhaps naming the population as a new species excites people because of the conservation implications, though in the U.S. the Endangered Species Act mandates the conservation of populations, not just species, so if these apes were in America, naming them as a new species would have no implications for conservation.

In the end, we have no strong evidence that this new species—nor the already-named Bornean and Sumatran orangs—would show any reproductive isolation from the other “species” were they to come into contact in nature. All we have is a geographically isolated population that has some genetic and morphological differentiation. To call it a new “species” turns taxonomy into a completely arbitrary exercise, which, as Dr. Sommer notes, becomes purely subjective. Until we have evidence of reproductive isolation or potential isolation between this population and the others, I’d say “forget about calling it a new species.” And on top of that I’d say that “calling the Bornean and Sumatran orangs different species is also a purely subjective decision”. If the latter two produced sterile offspring in zoos, I’d be down with calling those species different. But they don’t: they produce “cocktail orangs.” LUMP ALL THE ORANGS!

It would have been nice had the media asked a few evolutionary biologists whether this population qualifies as a new species. And I’d ask them this: if we really have an astounding new species of great ape here, why wasn’t it published in Nature or Science? My guess is because those journals would bridle at making that call on the basis of the data presented.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

UPDATE: Just as I finished my bit above, I got an email from Greg Mayer, who said he’d contribute his take on the orangs, too. I’m just pasting it in here without reading it so you can get his opinion. (The title of this post is for my bit alone.)

[Note from GCM: The title is Jerry’s, but I concur, so I’m adding it to mine as a second contribution. We spoke briefly by phone this morning, so knew each other’s reaction to the paper was dubious, but wrote separately.]

A new species of orangutan? I doubt it. II.

By Greg Mayer:

The paper’s chief conclusion—that there is a second species of orangutan on Sumatra—is not well-supported by the data presented.

The morphological analysis is risible. They have a single (1!!!) specimen, and compare it to only 33 others. The analysis boils down to “Can we tell this one from the other ones?” They say yes, but that’s not clear from the evidence presented. The most obvious method of doing so—presenting an ordination (e.g. principal components) of the morphological measurements, and showing that the single specimen lies well outside the cloud of points formed by the  other 33—is not used.  They do show several one-dimensional PC plots, and the single specimen is outside the range of variation on a single axis. (Curiously, their first few PC axes account for very little variation, which is highly unusual. This could be explained in the methods, but, as is usual these days, the methods are not in the paper, but in a supplement). They note, as though it supports their claims, that the single specimen is not in the interquartile range of 24 of 39 skull measurements. “Outside of the interquartile range” ?!?—that didn’t qualify as a subspecies in the heyday of oversplitting!

Of course, even if they could recognize this single individual, that wouldn’t mean anything other than individuals are different from one another. If you gave me 34 people, I’d be able to tell them all apart with 39 measurements– that wouldn’t, of course, come close to showing they belonged to different species. (It would be especially easy to tell them apart if 1 of the people was from Sicily, and the other 33 from Germany.) A minimal morphological analysis would require showing that the means and ranges of population multivariate phenotypes are such that individuals in the population are either diagnostically or statistically distinct.

The call differences are presented perfunctorily and incompletely, so no inferences can be drawn. Differences in calls, which are of potential interest as they may entail reproductive isolation (e.g., as in frogs), possibly have large cultural components in orangs (as they do in humans), and thus require careful study to determine their characteristics and effects.

The genetic analysis, taken at face value, indicates gene flow quite recently, until the habitats became geographically separated, directly contradicting their claim of specific status. That the single Y chromosome observed nests neatly within other Sumatran orangs again subverts their claim. I have been unable to determine how many individuals of the “new” species were genotyped in some way– Table S4 in the supplement should have that information, but that table is not in what downloads, and clicking on what seems to be a link to it goes nowhere.

I have additional issues: Does demographic reconstruction software really work? If species are anything I can can distinguish, doesn’t that make everything a different species? Have you tried applying that concept to extant Homo?

The plaintive defense of “operational species” concepts is a bit sad, and deeply confused conceptually. Citing Gorilla and Neaderthals as supporting their case again does the opposite, because there is only one species of Gorilla and Neanderthals are conspecific with sapiens, as the very genetic studies they cite prove. Their own studies prove the conspecificity of their “new ” species.

The above is obviously a quick reaction, not a complete analysis, but fell free to use any or all of it in your post.

I used it all.

___________

Nater, A., M. P. Mattle-Greminger, A. Nurcahyo, M. G. Nowak, M. de Manuel, T. Desai, C. Groves, M. Pybus, T. B. Sonay, C. Roos, A. R. Lameira, S. A. Wich, J. Askew, M. Davila-Ross, G. Fredriksson, G. de Valles, F. Casals, J. Prado-Martinez, B. Goossens, E. J. Verschoor, K. S. Warren, I. Singleton, D. A. Marques, J. Pamungkas, D. Perwitasari-Farajallah, P. Rianti, A. Tuuga, I. G. Gut, M. Gut, P. Orozco-terWengel, C. P. van Schaik, J. Bertranpetit, M. Anisimova, A. Scally, T. Marques-Bonet, E. Meijaard, and M. Krützen. 2017. Morphometric, behavioral, and genomic evidence for a new orangutan species. Current Biology, in press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.09.047