Kim Valenta

University of Florida | UF · Department of Anthropology

Lemurs are the most endangered group of mammals on earth, and invasive species, including domestic dogs, are considered to be the second greatest threat to biodiversity after habitat loss. Here, we describe and summarize the challenges and results of a decade of research aimed at understanding the impact of dogs on lemurs, and efforts to humanely r...

Background: Color is a critical visual signal in plant-animal interactions, including pollination and seed dispersal. It is generally believed that plant colors evolve under selection pressure from animal interactors. Red, in particular, is associated with several well-known phenomena: Why are so many bird-pollinated flowers red? Why are red fruits...

How Primate Foraging Strategies Modulate Responses to Anthropogenic Change and Thus Primate Conservation.

Pollination and seed dispersal are crucial processes for plant reproduction, sharing ecological relevance and similarities, yet they have rarely been considered together. Flowers appear to express greater phenotypic diversity than fruits due to multiple confounding factors, which pose challenges for comparative analyses. The colours of flowers and...

Seed dispersal is a critical phase in plant reproduction and forest regeneration. In many systems, the vast majority of woody species rely on seed dispersal by fruit‐eating animals. Animals differ in their size, movement patterns, seed handling, gut physiology, and many other factors that affect the number of seeds they disperse, the quality of tre...

Coevolution played a central role in shaping biodiversity. However, coevolutionary events driving reciprocal diversification between interacting partners lack empirical evidences. Examples of diversification arising from mutualisms and antagonisms at different trophic levels are scarce, which limits our understanding on how complex relationships be...

People are assisted by dogs in many activities which may bring them into contact with primates, often leading to negative interactions and outcomes for one or other species. People’s perceptions and behaviour towards dogs vary and are influenced by cultural and other factors. We present incidents of dog-primate harassment and predation found during...

Background Fleshy fruits evolved to be attractive to seed dispersers through various signals such as color and scent. Signals can evolve through different trajectories and have various degrees of reliability. The strongest substrate on which reliable signals can evolve is when there is an inherent link between signal and reward, rendering cheating...

Societal Impact Statement Identifying where introduced animals fit in a food web relative to each other and to endemic species is key for biodiversity conservation planning. Using a multiproxy study of dog feces from eastern Madagascar, we infer that even dogs that spend time in derived grasslands typically eat forest‐derived foods. Regardless of t...

Attempts to deter elephants from entering crop fields and human settlements in Africa have used various barriers (e.g. electric fences, chilli fences, beehive fences or plant barriers), situated on or very near the boundaries of fields or villages, with rather variable success. We explored a very simple new barrier concept based upon re-arranging t...

Madagascar is a threatened global biodiversity hotspot and conservation priority, yet we lack broad‐scale surveys to assess biodiversity across space and time. To fill this gap, we collated camera trap surveys, capturing species occurrences within Madagascar into a single standardized database. This data set includes nine distinct protected areas o...

Flowers are ubiquitous in primate environments, yet their nutritional advantages are underexamined. Symphonia globulifera is a widely distributed tree exploited by a variety of animals in Africa and the Americas. We collected S. globulifera flower samples consumed by red-tailed monkeys ( Cercopithecus ascanius ) and compared them nutritionally to f...

Human–wildlife conflicts are increasing in number and intensity making conflict mitigation and coexistence a top priority for wildlife conservation. Domesticated dogs ( Canis lupus familiaris ) can mitigate or exacerbate human–wildlife conflict leading to positive and negative impacts on both humans and wildlife. However, the human–dog–wildlife int...

Colorful displays have evolved in multiple plant and animal species as signals to mutualists, antagonists, competitors, mates, and other potential receivers. Studies of color have long relied on subjective classifications of color by human observers. However, humans have a limited ability to perceive color compared to other animals, and human biolo...

Fleshy fruits have evolved to be attractive to frugivorous seed dispersers. As a result, many fruit traits like size, color, scent and nutritional content are assumed to be the result of selective pressures exerted by frugivores. At the same time, fruit traits are also subjected to a set of other selective pressures and constraints. One such trait...

Canine rabies causes an estimated 60,000 human deaths per year, but these deaths are preventable through post-exposure prophylaxis of people and vaccination of domestic dogs. Dog vaccination campaigns targeting 70% of the population are effective at interrupting transmission. Here, we report on lessons learned during pilot dog vaccination campaigns...

Objectives Although fermented food use is ubiquitous in humans, the ecological and evolutionary factors contributing to its emergence are unclear. Here we investigated the ecological contexts surrounding the consumption of fruits in the late stages of fermentation by wild primates to provide insight into its adaptive function. We hypothesized that...

Objectives Although fermented food use is ubiquitous in humans, the ecological and evolutionary factors contributing to its emergence are unclear. Here we investigated the ecological contexts surrounding the consumption of fruits in the late stages of fermentation by wild primates to provide insight into its adaptive function. We hypothesized that...

Domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) are estimated to be one of the most globally abundant invasive carnivores that threaten wildlife. Madagascar is home to large populations of free-roaming dogs and is a highly diverse and anthropogenically threatened environment, making it one of the world's top conservation priorities. Comparatively little is...

We report the discovery and sequence-based molecular characterization of a novel virus, lanama virus (LNMV), in blood samples obtained from two wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus), sampled near Lake Nabugabo, Masaka District, Uganda. Sequencing of the complete viral genomes and subsequent phylogenetic analysis identified LNMV as a distinc...

Human-elephant conflict is a persistent problem across elephant home ranges, that results in economic damage to commercial and subsistence farmers, and physical harm and death to humans and elephants. This problem is likely to intensify with increased development, dwindling of natural habitats, and climate change-driven environmental shifts. Variou...

Background: Fruit scent is increasingly recognized as an evolved signal whose function is to attract animal seed dispersers and facilitate plant reproduction. However, like all traits, fruit scent is likely to evolve in response to conflicting selective pressures and various constraints. Two major constraints are (i) phylogenetic constraints, in w...

The outcomes of human-elephant conflict range from expensive to fatal to both humans and elephants across Africa and Asia, which has prompted extensive efforts to mitigate it. Previous attempts have focused primarily on physical barriers , plant deterrent compounds, and elephant-nuisance species. However, the handful of effective approaches are exp...

Abstract The ability to assess food quality is crucial to all organisms. Fleshy fruits are a major source of nutrients to various animals, and unlike most food sources, have evolved to be attractive and to be consumed by animals to promote seed dispersal. It has recently been established that fruit scent—the bouquet of volatile chemicals emitted by...

Background: Plant absorption of ultraviolet (UV) radiation can result in multiple deleterious effects to plant tissues. As a result, plants have evolved an array of strategies to protect themselves from UV radiation, particularly in the UV-B range (280-320 nm). A common plant response to UV exposure is investment in phenolic compounds that absorb...

Certain features of both extant and fossil anthropoid primates have been interpreted as adaptations to ripe fruit foraging and feeding particularly spatulate incisors and trichro-matic color vision. Here, we approach the question of anthropoid fruit foraging adaptations in light of the sensory and mechanical properties of anthropoid-consumed fruits...

Fleshy fruits have evolved multiple times and display a tremendous diversity of colours, shapes, aromas and textures. For over a century this was attributed, at least in part, to frugivore‐driven selection. The dispersal syndrome hypothesis posits that fruits and frugivores co‐evolved, each exerting sufficient selective pressure on one another, and...

Madagascar lost a large number of large-bodied animal species during the Holocene. Many of them played important roles as seed dispersers. In the case of the largest-seeded species, giant lemurs or elephant birds may have been the sole dispersers because no extant frugivore has a gape size large enough to ingest those seeds. These plant species now...

Effective, targeted management and conservation plans for wildlife populations require reliable population sampling and estimation. Unfortunately, robust, comprehensive primate population estimates are often lacking, particularly for rare, elusive species. Historically, population estimates of primates have relied on labor-intensive line-transect s...

Plant species with fleshy fruits offer animals rewards such as sugar, protein, and fat, to feed on their fruits and disperse their seeds. They have also evolved visual and olfactory signals indicating their presence and ripeness. In some systems, fruit color serves as a reliable visual signal of nutrient content. Yet even though many volatile chemi...

The lemurs of Madagascar are threatened by human activities. We present the first molecular detection of canine heartworm (Dirofilaria immitis)in a wild non-human primate, the mouse lemur (Microcebus rufus). Zoonotic D. immitis infection has been associated with clinical pathology that includes serious and often fatal cardiac and pulmonary reaction...

Conservation plans have evolved beyond biodiversity protection to include the welfare of the communities surrounding protected areas. Local community engagement initiatives include development of ecotourism, revenue-sharing arrangements, and resource access agreements. Although research stations are common in African national parks, their contribut...

It is widely viewed that by providing employment or services to neighbouring communities, a protected area may increase positive attitudes towards conservation and discourage encroachment, but this is rarely tested. Our research examines this view by evaluating local attitudes towards the park and incidence of encroachment before and after the impl...

Primates are found in all sorts of habitats, from temperate zones, to deserts, to mountains, to lowland forests. Their distribution is driven by two main factors. First, resources (food, shelter, mates) are unevenly distributed in the environment, with some areas containing higher densities of resources than others. Second, primates need to take in...

The ecological function of fruit colour has been the focus of many studies. The most commonly tested hypothesis is that fruit colour has evolved to facilitate detection by seed-dispersing animals. We tested whether distributions of fruit colours are consistent with the hypothesis that colour is an evolved signal to seed dispersers using a comparati...

Abstract The adaptive significance of fruit colour has been investigated for over a century. While colour can fulfil various functions, the most commonly tested hypothesis is that it has evolved to increase fruit visual conspicuousness and thus promote detection and consumption by seed dispersing animals. However, fruit colour is a complex trait wh...

Objective Clostridium difficile spores play an important role in transmission and can survive in the environment for several months. Optimal methods for measuring environmental C. difficile are unknown. We sought to determine whether increased sample surface area improved detection of C. difficile from environmental samples. Setting Samples were c...

Primates are now known to possess a keen sense of smell that serves them in various contexts, including feeding. Many primate species are frugivorous and provide essential seed dispersal services to a variety of plants. Studies of pollination ecology, and recently seed dispersal ecology, indicate that animal mutualist behavior exerts selection pres...

While the importance of frugivorous primates as seed dispersers is well established, the question of the extent to which they exert selective pressure on fruit color phenotypes is contested. Numerous studies have identified suites of primate fruit colors, but the lack of agreement among them illustrates the difficulty of identifying the match betwe...

Fruiting, flowering, and leaf set patterns influence many aspects of tropical forest communities, but there are few long-term studies examining potential drivers of these patterns, particularly in Africa. We evaluated a 15-year dataset of tree phenology in Kibale National Park, Uganda, to identify abiotic predictors of fruit phenological patterns a...

The rapid disappearance of tropical forests, the potential impacts of climate change, and the increasing threats of bushmeat hunting to wildlife, makes it imperative that we understand wildlife population dynamics. With long-lived animals this requires extensive, long-term data, but such data is often lacking. Here we present longitudinal data docu...

We present the first cross continental comparison of the flowering and fruiting phenology of tropical forests across Africa. Flowering events of 5,446 trees from 196 species across 12 sites, and fruiting events of 4,595 trees from 191 species, across 11 sites were monitored over periods of 6 to 29 years, and analysed to describe phenology at the co...

Integration between ecology and biogeography provides insights into how niche specialization affects the geographical distribution of species. Given that rivers are not effective barriers to dispersal in three parapatric species of squirrel monkeys (Saimiri vanzolinii, S. cassiquiarensis and S. macrodon) inhabiting floodplain forests of Central Ama...

The field of primatology has reached the stage where there are sufficient long-term studies and many shorter investigations on the same species at many different locations, in which we are able to appreciate how variable the behaviour of primates can be and how predictable their environment is over space and time. For example, redtail monkeys (Cerc...

Many researchers have posited the existence of fruit syndromes – sets of fruit traits such as colour, odour and size that match the behaviour, morphology and sensory adaptations of their key seed dispersal agents. Implicit in this hypothesis is the idea that dispersers have been the selective force behind fruit syndromes, based on their feeding pre...

Plants are prone to attack by a great diversity of antagonists against which they deploy various defence mechanisms, of which the two principle ones are mechanical and chemical defences. These defences are hypothesized to be negatively correlated due to either functional redundancy or a trade-off, i.e., plants which rely on increased mechanical def...

Globally, habitat degradation is accelerating, especially in the tropics. Changes to interface habitats can increase environmental overlap among nonhuman primates, people, and domestic animals and change stress levels in wildlife, leading to changes in their risk of parasite infections. However, the direction and consequences of these changes are u...

Protected areas (PA) aim to eliminate many of the threats that species face on the greater landscape. In the last three decades, PA's have expanded considerably; however, quantitative assessments of how well they have mitigated threats to habitat and biodiversity are very limited. Habitat bordering PA's and the wildlife that use it are threatened b...

Simian primates (monkeys and apes) are typically long-lived animals with slow life histories. They also have varying social organization and can slowly impact their environment by either being seed dispersers or by overbrowsing their food trees. As a result, short-term studies and those focusing on just 1 location only provide a snapshot of simian...

Reproduction in many angiosperms depends on attracting animals that provide pollination and seed dispersal services. Flowers and fleshy fruits present various features that can attract animal mutualists through visual, olfactory, acoustic, and tactile cues and signals, and some of these traits may result from selection exerted by pollinators and se...

Primates are found in all sorts of habitats, from temperate zones, to deserts, to mountains, to lowland forests. Primate distribution is driven by two main factors. First, resources (food, shelter, mates) are unevenly distributed in the environment, and some areas contain higher resource densities than others and thus are selected. Second, primates...

Primates are long-lived animals with complex life histories, which slowly impact their environment through seed dispersal and herbivory. As a result, short-term studies only provide a snapshot of a primate's life and poorly represent their environmental effects. Therefore long-term studies are needed. The need for long-term studies has taken on urg...

ContextThe study of habitat fragmentation is complex because multiple, potentially synergistic, ecological processes may be acting simultaneously. Further, edge effects themselves may be complex in that additivity from multiple edges can give rise to heterogeneous nearest–edge gradients. Objectives We used heat diffusion as a proxy for additive edg...

Resting by primates is considered an understudied activity, relative to feeding or moving, despite its importance in physiological and time investment terms. Here we describe spider monkeys' (Ateles geoffroyi) travel from feeding to resting trees in a seasonal tropical forest of the Yucatan Peninsula. We followed adult and subadult individuals for...

The evolution of ecological idiosyncrasies in Madagascar has often been attributed to selective pressures stemming from extreme unpredictability in climate and resource availability compared to other tropical areas. With the exception of rainfall, few studies have investigated these assumptions. To assess the hypothesis that Madagascar’s paucity of...

Betampona phenological monitoring information. Data on the common name, identification, locality, height, diameter at breast height (DBH), and elevation for every tree included in phenological monitoring at Betampona. Species were identified by matching a Betampona-specific common name to an index of species developed by botanist Bernard Iambana in...

Exotic carnivores, particularly feral and domestic dogs, represent a serious threat to Madagascar's endemic fauna. We obtained information from the local community about dogs in villages in and around Ranomafana National Park (RNP), Madagascar. Surveys were conducted (N=359) to assess local opinions of dogs, reasons for owning dogs, and the willing...

Tropical landscapes are changing rapidly as a result of human modifications; however, despite increasing deforestation, human population growth, and the need for more agricultural land, deforestation rates have exceeded the rate at which land is converted to cropland or pasture. For deforested lands to have conservation value requires an understand...

Fruit ripeness can be indicated through changes in chromaticity, luminance, odor, hardness, and size to attract seed dispersing animals. We quantified these attributes for both ripe and unripe fruits of 31 lemur-dispersed plant species in Ankarafantsika National Park, a tropical dry forest in northwestern Madagascar. We used spectroscopy, gas-chrom...

Substantial research has shown that while some parasite infections can be fatal to hosts, most infections are sub-clinical and non-lethal. Such sub-clinical infections can nonetheless have negative consequences for the long-term fitness of the host such as reducing juvenile growth and the host’s ability to compete for food and mates. With such effe...

Tropical deforestation is occurring at a rapid rate and while many studies focus on primate adaptations to forest fragment, few studies investigate the impacts of highly degraded areas, where primates cohabit with humans. Here, we investigate how vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) survive and prosper in an extensively modified humanized lands...

The dwarf and mouse lemurs of Madagascar are two very species-rich lemur genera, yet there is a relative paucity of information on this primate family in published literature. In this first ever treatment of the Cheirogaleidae, international experts are brought together to review and integrate our current knowledge of the behaviour, physiology, eco...

Animal reliance on fruit signals, such as hardness, colour, and odour, during foraging is poorly understood. Here, we present data on fruit foraging behaviour and efficiency (rate of fruit ingestion) of three groups of wild, frugivorous brown lemurs (Eulemur fulvus, N = 29 individuals) in Ankarafantsika National Park, Madagascar. We quantify fruit...

The spatial distribution of adult trees is typically not expected to reflect the spatial patterns of primary seed dispersal, due to many factors influencing post-dispersal modification of the seed shadow, such as seed predation, secondary seed dispersal and density-dependent survival. Here, we test the hypothesis that spatial distributions of prima...

Within the second paragraph of page 494 incorrect language was used to characterize the summary characteristics used. Sentences 3–11 of this paragraph should have read: Second, we calculated three univariate summary characteristics: the nearest neighbour distribution function D( r ), the pair-correlation function g( r ) and the K-function K( r ). T...

In contrast to the majority of primates, which exhibit dedicated diurnality or nocturnality, all species of Eulemur are cathemeral. Colour vision, in particular, is strongly affected by the spectral composition and intensity of ambient light, and the impact of activity period on the evolution of primate colour vision is actively debated. We studied...