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Up a Tree Over New Monkey

Posted on: Friday, 26 May 2006, 12:00 CDT

MILWAUKEE _ It's one thing to discover a new species of small mammal, lizard or insect in a remote thicket of jungle. It's quite another to stumble upon a 30-pound primate in the forests of Tanzania _ a primate so unique that scientists have proposed christening it with a new genus designation.

That's precisely what happened when a team of researchers _ from the Chicago Field Museum, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Yale University and the University of Alaska _ discovered and then analyzed a "kipunji" monkey that had been caught in a farmer's trap while trying to steal corn.

Researchers say the monkey, which initially was described as a mangabey, actually is more closely related to baboons _ or the genus Papio _ according to DNA analyses.

The problem is its skeletal anatomy and physical appearance are so unlike any other baboon species, the team felt it couldn't belong to that group, either.

Therefore, it has proposed an entirely new genus name for the critter: Rungwecebus kipunji.

The monkey, which is called kipunji in the local Kinyakusa language, could be the first new African monkey genus designation in 83 years. It is described this month in the journal Science.

The new designation has not been accepted by everybody in the fields of molecular and evolutionary primatology.

One primatologist thinks the findings are premature.

"It's not that they are definitely wrong," it's just that their methodology is highly questionable, said Todd Disotell, an expert on the DNA relationships of baboons and mangabeys at New York University.

"Their hearts are in the right place," he said of the team of researchers, but he worries that by rushing this designation, the team could be doing more harm than good for conservation.

The kipunji monkey was first spotted a year and a half ago, in two different regions by two researchers working separately in Tanzania: Tim R.B. Davenport of the Wildlife Conservation Society and Carolyn Ehardt at the University of Georgia.

They reported their discovery in May 2005 in the journal Science, calling the monkey the Highland mangabey, and started to monitor the animals in the southern Tanzania forests of the Rungwe-Livingstone mountains and the Ndundulu Forest Reserve.

The monkey, which is gray-brown with a face about the same color, also has a mane of hair crisscrossing its head _ "kind of like a Mohawk in two directions," said William Stanley, a co-author of this most recent study and a Chicago Field Museum researcher.

Its discovery caused an international stir.

How could researchers have missed this large East African primate, weighing between 22 and 35 pounds?

Last summer, a kipunji monkey was trapped by a farmer as it attempted a raid on his cornfield.

The farmer, who had been in touch with two researchers from the Conservation Society, contacted them immediately. The monkey was preserved for analysis.

Stanley, who was working on an island off the coast of Tanzania collecting bat and rat specimens, got to the site and the investigation began.

Meanwhile, tissue samples were sent to Link Olson in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he started looking for the animal's closest relatives via DNA.

To everyone's surprise, his results indicated that this animal was not a mangabey, in the Lophocebus genus, but more closely related to the baboons of the Papio genus.

But when Stanley and Eric Sargis of Yale examined the skull and skeleton, they couldn't corroborate a close relationship with baboons: the nose wasn't long and snouty, and it lacked some distinctive baboonish "depressions" on its facial bones.

The analyses were particularly tricky, said Stanley, because the animal was a juvenile male, and therefore, not fully grown.

But using the Field Museum's extensive collection of juvenile male baboon and mangabey skeletons as comparisons, the researchers were confident that despite this kipunji's age, it didn't belong to the baboon group.

Therefore, the team figured the animal needed its own genus designation _ a decision that has been far from universally accepted.

Three researchers _ considered experts in their specific branches of primatology _ think the classification is both premature and flawed.

Disotell, of New York University, said the genetic analyses were less than satisfactory and possibly incorrect.

He is backed by Ehardt, the Georgia researcher who first spotted the kipunji monkeys in the Ndundulu Forest Reserve, and Colin Groves, an evolutionary primatologist at the Australian National University considered one of the world's top primate taxonomists.

"I was very troubled by two things," said Groves. "First was the fact that their phylogenetic (taxonomic) tree was so unlike any of the trees generated by a number of independent analyses over the past 10 years or so, and second was the sheer implausibility of a monkey with such a very Lophocebus skull being nested among the baboons."

Disotell went further, highlighting inadequacies in the specific methodologies used and the conclusions drawn.

Although Alaska's Olson cites the use of five genes to support breaking the kipunji away from the Lophocebus grouping, Disotell said even a cursory reading of the paper should discredit that notion.

One gene, he said, supports the authors' conclusion but lacks statistical significance, while another merely doesn't contradict it, said Disotell.

The other three genes, taken from mitochondrial DNA, as opposed to nuclear DNA, "only count as one (gene) and they give discordant results when analyzed separately."

However, taken together, the three genes support the authors' conclusions.

He said their analysis was similar to "figuring out the average salary of a three-person department in which two workers are paid $25,000 and the boss is paid $100,000. The average would be $50,000, which nobody makes."

Whether the new name will stand depends on "the test of time," said Gary Rosenberg, a commissioner of the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature.

He said that while there is no voting committee or application process for naming new groups of animals, for a designation to stand, other scientists would have to publicly support and verify _ or contradict _ the findings.

___

(c) 2006, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

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Source: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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