Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: …and everything else

Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.

Grieving Baboons Comforted By Friends

...and everything else, Thesis

Female baboons that suffer the loss of a close friend or relative turn to other baboons for comfort and support, according to a new study that encompassed 14 years of observing over 80 free-ranging baboons in Botswana’s Okavango Delta.

The study provides the first direct evidence that certain animals mourn the loss of individuals, even when the rest of their social group remains intact. The findings also suggest that friendship may be just as important to some primates as it is for humans.

Researchers particularly were struck by the behavior of one female chacma baboon (Papio hamadryas ursinus) named Sylvia, who was described as “the queen of mean” and disdainful of other baboons until she lost her daughter, Sierra, to a lion kill.

“In the week after Sierra died, Sylvia was withdrawn,” said Anne Engh, who led the project. “When the other females were grooming and socializing, she tended to sit alone and rarely interacted even with her other relatives.”

Engh, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, added, “After a week or two of moping around, Sylvia suddenly initiated grooming with several low-ranking females. I think that they were as surprised as I was ”” they seemed awfully nervous at first. Eventually, Sylvia settled into close relationships with a very low-ranking female and with Sierra’s daughter, Margaret.”

Engh explained to Discovery news that grooming is a friendly behavior where baboons clean each other’s fur.

Similar to two human friends chatting over a drink, the activity seems to relax the participants to the point where it can lower stress hormone levels. Those levels rise in humans and baboons after a close friend or relative dies.

The researchers measured a group of such hormones, called glucocorticoids, in Sylvia and 20 other females. Baboons that experienced losses did have elevated levels of the hormones after the deaths.

In humans, this is associated with bereavement, so it is likely that baboons also grieve their dead.

Empiress

...and everything else, life and living

Someone watched me “work” a social situation yesterday, smoothing out ruffled feelings and making sure everyone got back on the same page. Apparently it was a masterful, and somewhat scary, thing to watch. I don’t really know how I feel about that.

On the one hand, yes. I did manipulate the situation. I did lead one person to a conclusion I thought needed to be reached, but I let said person reach it on their own. I just…helped. Steered the conversation, if you will. I suppose if you wanted to form it in cliche terms, I led the horse to the water, and the horse opted to drink.

On the other hand, I feel weird that someone watched me do that, and might have a much different impression of who I am – that I’m some weird manipulator or puppetmaster working things behind the scene to my own advantage (although, to clarify, nothing I did was for my own advantage, other than make sure two friends stayed friendly). I was assured that it wasn’t an issue, and that it was an awesome thing to watch me shift roles so fluidly and just handle the situation, and that, combined with my ability to get just about anyone to talk to me, simply left the witness wondering why I wasn’t working for the government in some information gathering service.

This apparently left a deep impression on my subconscious mind, because when I woke up this morning, I was having thoughts about being empiress of the world.

In other news, I have changed the RSS feed for this journal, so that it syndicates the entire post, not just a summary. I hope that makes reading more convenient for y’all.

Intellectual Jacking Off

...and everything else, Academics, Thesis

I’m at a loss for intelligent things to say this evening, largely because they’ve already been said. I spent what might just be the most productive two hours of this quarter bouncing around ideas with Adam, and have solidified key aspects of my thesis. While this is what I was hoping would come from a session like this, I’m still astonished at the productivity and accomplishment. After editing out side commentary, sarcasm, and secondary conversation, I still have five pages of notes to turn into a coherant document – and, in my not at all humble or detached opinion, it’s stellar stuff; a revisiting of what [societal] we know in separate intellectual spheres but haven’t pulled together into a cohesive whole.

I cannot reiterate enough just how thankful I am to be working with Adam on this process. He surprises me; so often he acts like the dumb fratboy that I forget he has a whip-smart mind and is frighteningly intelligent. But more than thankful, I’m just happy – I haven’t had the chance to wax academia for hours on end with a – what? An equal? A colleague? However you want to phrase it, someone at my ‘level’ of knowledge and esoteria – in I can’t remember how long. It’s wonderful to feel this excited about school and my thesis, and just the re-energizing I needed. I only hope that I can return the favour several-fold in kind.