When species have babies with conspicuous fur, it can attract good attention—or bad. A new theory could explain why.
For some primates, an older theory is that it’s a warning sign to outsiders. “These really bright, contrasting infants might be a sign to intruders that the mothers are going to defend them vigorously,” Stankowich says. But he and his team were skeptical. “It really makes more sense that these coats are signals to theTo poke at the theories, the team needed a more systematic way of analyzing the data.
Stankowich recalled the example of the American coots. The chicks hatch with orange features around their heads, and this encourages the parents to feed them more. So for the primate species they were studying, the team checked data related to parental nurturing and how quickly the babies develop, to see if there might be any intriguing patterns.
“The work advances a key unresolved question in primate colouration that has been understudied in the last 20 years,” William Allen, an evolutionary ecologist at Swansea University in the United Kingdom, writes in an email to WIRED. “But the result still leaves us a long way from understanding the phenomenon.”
She notes that some primate infants are already highly visible to their mothers. While nursing, an infant sits on its mother’s chest. And for many primates, torso hair is lighter than the rest of their hair—a baby that has the same coloration as its parents would still stand out, thanks to being on this pale background. Still, Bradley is excited to have these results and the cautiously presented hypothesis. “That is exactly what we should be doing as evolutionary biologists,” she says.
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