Julie Allen, an evolutionary biologist in UF’s department of biology, describes her research on the Red Colobus monkey in Uganda, an area with an unprecedented number of species of primates.
Julie used genetics to understand how long this population has lived in this forest, and give clues to how long the forest itself has been a stable environment for them. It was surprising to find out how long they have lived in this forest!
Interview and videos produced by Caroline Roper for Explore Research at the University of Florida.
Transcript
Julie Allen: There’s this place in Uganda called Kibale National Forest that is one of the most species-rich areas in the world for primate species. So there are 13 different species of monkeys in this forest and that’s essentially unprecedented anywhere else in the world, and one of the primate species that is there is this red colobus monkey.
What we wanted to know with this research is how stable is this population of monkeys. So how long have these monkeys been in this forest and we can use genetics and actually look at the history of these monkeys to say has this population gone through a bottleneck in the past. So has the population crashed recently and if so that would suggest then that something happened to its habitat, and what we found, which was completely unexpected, is that these monkeys pop – this monkey population has been stable for at least 50,000 years and if not a lot longer than that.
So this suggests then that this forest itself has actually remained stable for the last 50 thousand years and likely then been buffered a lot of other species throughout the last – throughout the climate changes of late Pleistocene.
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