1/9/2024 0 Comments Breaks actimeter![]() "While laboratory studies have pointed to the importance of masking in determining the environmental factors that cause animals to switch from nocturnal activity patterns to diurnal ones or vice versa, our study underscores the importance of masking in determining the daily activity patterns of animals living in the wild. "The behavioral outcome for these owl monkeys is nocturnal activity maximized during relatively warm, moonlit nights," said Eduardo Fernández-Duque, lead investigator and an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology in Penn's School of Art and Sciences. Conversely, new-moon nights were usually followed by mornings of higher diurnal activity than mornings following full-moon nights. Throughout the year, nocturnal activity was higher during full-moon nights than during new-moon ones, and these peaks of nocturnal activity were consistently followed by mornings of low activity. Specifically, date showed that nocturnal activity was more consolidated during the relatively warmer months of September to March than during the colder months of April to August, when temperatures in the Argentine province of Formosa regularly fall below 10✬. ![]() The data indicate that, although regular daytime activity is represented by the output of a circadian clock, nocturnality is the result of fine-tuned masking of circadian rhythmicity by environmental light and temperature. The results represent the first long-term study of wild primates providing direct evidence for environmental masking, according to researchers. Researchers monitored the activity of these wild owl monkeys continually for as long as 18 months using actimeter collars fitted to them. The observational nature of field studies has generally limited science's understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the change in activity patterns of these species, whose behavior traditionally takes place in the dimmest of light. Put simply, changes in temperature and light make Azara's owl monkeys the only anthropoid primate (monkeys, apes and humans) with a propensity for both early bird and night owl behavior. ![]() ![]() Researchers set out to examine the hypothesis that masking, the chronobiology term for the stimulation or inhibition of activity, was largely caused by changing environmental factors that affected the Azara's owl monkeys' internal timing system, or synchronized circadian rhythm. The study also provides data to better understand all life cycles. It is possible, according to the study results, that changes in sensitivity to specific environmental stimuli may have been an essential key for evolutionary switches between diurnal and nocturnal habits in primates. The study also indicates that when the senses relay information on these environmental factors, it can influence daily activity and, in the case of a particular monkey species, may have even produced evolutionary change. ![]()
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