Laura M Bolt

• PhD
• Adjunct Professor at University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM)

Squeals are sharp and forceful short-range vocalizations used as aggressive and submissive agonistic signals by many mammalian species. The ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), a female-dominant strepsirhine primate, has a male-specific squeal call with proposed male-male agonistic functions and male-female courtship functions that have never been empi...

Long calls are sex-specific vocalizations used for mate attraction or mate defense in many animal species. Ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta), female-dominant strepsirrhines, have a male-specific long call termed a howl, with proposed functions that have never been empirically tested. I aimed to investigate why ring-tailed lemur males howl and to tes...

In mammals, purring has been described in mostly affiliative contexts. In the ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), both males and females purr, but only males were observed purring in agonistic contexts. In order to determine whether male ring-tailed lemurs purr as aggressive displays during intrasexual agonistic encounters, 480 h of focal data were co...

The ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta) is a group-living strepsirrhine primate endemic to Madagascar that faces considerable predation pressure from aerial and terrestrial predators. This species engages in mobbing and vigilance behavior in response to predators , and has referential alarm vocalizations. Because L. catta is female dominant, less is kn...

Charles Darwin had an unexpected theory on music’s origins. He suggested that human music, like the acoustic communication of songbirds, is a sexually selected adaptation for courtship. Men sing to attract potential mates, and women accept the males they find the most appealing. Darwin based his theory on the similarity between birdsong and human m...

Habitat loss due to deforestation is a primary threat to global biodiversity. Clearing tropical rainforests for agriculture or development leads to forest fragmentation. Forest fragments contain fewer large trees and provide lower food availability for primates compared to continuous forests. Mantled howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata) inhabit fragm...

Maderas Rainforest Conservancy (MRC) is a conservation non-profit organization that protects forests, offers primate field schools, and leads community outreach initiatives at sites in Central America, including La Suerte Biological Research Station (LSBRS) in Costa Rica. In 2018, MRC started Aula Verde, a conservation education initiative for elem...

Conservation funding is currently limited; cost-effective conservation solutions are essential. We suggest that the thousands of field stations worldwide can play key roles at the frontline of biodiversity conservation and have high intrinsic value. We assessed field stations’ conservation return on investment and explored the impact of COVID-19. W...

Social behavior is a key adaptation for group‐living primates. It is important to assess changes to social behavior in human‐impacted landscape zones to better understand the impact of anthropogenic disturbance on primate species. We investigated social behavior rate and type in three species of platyrrhines across 100 m anthropogenic edge and inte...

In the face of widespread habitat destruction and forest fragmentation, it is critical to understand primate demography to assess population viability across populations inhabiting continuous forests and fragmented landscapes. While mantled howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata) have traditionally been considered resilient to habitat destruction, their...

Fragmented forests contain natural edges, including riparian zones, and anthropogenic edges. Edges generally have lower plant density and fewer large trees than forest interior. Riparian edges, however, contain gap-specialist trees yielding leaves with high protein content, providing primates with important resources. We examined mantled howler mon...

Rivers are important components of animal habitats worldwide. The area near riparian edge (≤100m from the river) has different abiotic characteristics and vegetation than both forest interior and areas bordering human development, which may lead to differences in animal feeding behaviour. To better contextualize the impact of human-caused habitat d...

With the majority of primates living close to forest edges, it is imperative to under- stand how edges afect primate distribution and behaviour. Defnitions of edge, however, vary across studies, with many defning edge a priori and few explicitly measuring the depth of edge infuence (DEI). In this study, we aimed to functionally defne edge for mantl...

Primate population size and demography are important to quantify as part of ongoing conservation efforts in tropical regions. The mantled howler monkey (Alouatta palliata) has a wide range from southern Mexico, through Central America to western Colombia, Ecuador and just into Tumbes, Peru. It is known to persist in anthropogenically-disturbed habi...

Maderas Rainforest Conservancy (MRC) is a conservation-focused non-profit organization that is devoted to protecting the tropical forests they manage in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and to providing conservation education for international university students through biological field schools. The MRC Primate Behavior and Ecology course is their most fr...

Anthropogenic pressures resulting in habitat fragmentation are the leading threat to primate populations worldwide. In order to adapt to smaller forest fragments, primates may adjust social behavior and spatial cohesion in response to conditions of reduced resource availability and increased predation pressure. This study investigated whether mantl...

Animal communication has long been thought to be subject to pressures and constraints associated with social relationships. However, our understanding of how the nature and quality of social relationships relates to the use and evolution of communication is limited by a lack of directly comparable methods across multiple levels of analysis. Here, w...

Anthropogenic forest fragmentation impacts many aspects of animal behaviour, including feeding ecology. With forests increasingly fragmented in tropical regions due to human development, the proportion of forest edge (≤ 100 m from clear-cut regions) is higher relative to forest interior. Forest edges differ in vegetation from interior, making it im...

Maderas Rainforest Conservancy (MRC) was incorporated as a conservation nonprofit organization in 2008, and manages two sites where biological field courses have been offered since the 1990s: La Suerte Biological Research Station in Costa Rica, and Ometepe Biological Research Station in Nicaragua. MRC employs a One Health approach to conservation e...

Vocalizations are used by group-living animals as aggressive and submissive signals during agonistic interactions, and also maintain dominance hierarchies in many species. For gregarious strepsirrhines with large vocal repertoires and differentiated dominance ranks like the ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), agonistic vocalization use is important to...

Objectives: Many group-living primate species have evolved the capacity for some individuals to live alone for part of their lives, but this solitary life stage has rarely been the subject of focused research. The mantled howler monkey (Alouatta palliata) is a social primate species with bisexual dispersal that lives in mixed-sex groups with low ma...

Forest fragmentation increases forest edge relative to forest interior, with lower vegetation quality common for primates in edge zones. Because most primates live in human-modified tropical forests within 1 km of edge, it is critical to understand how primates cope with edge effects. Few studies have investigated how primates inhabiting a fragment...

Affiliative vocalizations occur across primate taxa, and may be used to maintain spatial cohesion and/or to regulate social interactions in group-living species. For gregarious strepsirhines like the ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), with large vocal repertoires and several distinct affiliative vocalizations including the chirp and wail, it is impor...

Haplorhini is one of two suborders in the order Primates and a type of eutherian mammal. Haplorhine (Haplorhini) primates consist of tarsiers, monkeys, apes, and humans.

Primates are mammals with complex and large brains compared to body size and traits including an enhanced sense of touch, increased reliance on vision, and reduced reliance on sense of smell compared to other mammals. Their sensory systems allow them to perceive and interpret the world around them, and include vision (sight), olfaction (smell), gus...

Rivers represent natural edges in forests, serving as transition zones between landscapes. Natural edge effects are important to study to understand how intrinsic habitat variations affect wildlife as well as the impact of human‐induced forest fragmentation. We examined the influence of riparian and anthropogenic edge on mantled howler, white‐faced...

The ways that forest edges may affect animal vocalization behaviour are poorly understood. We investigated the effects of various types of edge habitat on the loud calls (howls) of a folivorous-frugivorous primate species, Alouatta palliata, with reference to the ecological resource defence hypothesis, which predicts that males howl to defend veget...

The function of long calling is a subject of interest across animal behaviour study, particularly within primatology. Many primate species have male‐specific long‐distance calls, including platyrrhines like the folivorous howler monkey (Alouatta spp.). Howler monkeys may howl to defend resources such as feeding trees or areas of rich vegetation fro...

When a forest is fragmented, this increases the amount of forest edge relative to the interior. Edge effects can lead to loss of animal and plant species and decreased plant biomass near forest edges. We examined the influence of an anthropogenic forest edge comprising cattle pasture, coconut plantations, and human settlement on the mantled howler...

The ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta) is a group-living strepsirhine primate endemic to Madagascar that has a complex vocal repertoire including affiliative moan and hmm calls. Past research has suggested that both vocalisations may be contact calls, and we assessed their usage in addition to examining the effect of individual differences and social...

When a predator is seen, animals from various taxa produce alarm vocalizations. In some cases, alarm calling when a predator is nearby drives the predator away, but in other cases, the caller is pursued by the predator. Calling therefore often leads to greater risk to the vocalizer. Some rodents make anti-predator vocalizations despite this greater...

The predator confusion hypothesis (Sherman 1977, 1981) predicts that group-living animals are adapted to make alarm calls that distract or confuse predators, thus lowering the predator’s chances of consuming any prey individual. In birds and mammals, some species make antipredator vocalizations that are thought to confound predators (Ficken 1989)....

Sex-specific calls are used in male-male agonistic encounters and male-female courtship in many animal species. The ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta) is a gregarious Malagasy strepsirhine with twenty-two distinct vocalizations for adults, including two male-specific vocalizations and an additional vocalization with male-specific functions: the howl,...

This chapter will outline the evolution/creation controversy, providing summaries of the theories under debate, definitions of belief systems involved in the debate, an overview of debate history and important events in the United States, reasons why this controversy continues today, and ways that this controversy can be alleviated. This chapter cl...

The ringtailed lemur (Lemur catta) of Madagascar has been the flagship species for lemur communication research over the past forty years. This article offers a preliminary investigation on how theories about human interaction and communication by Erving Goffman, Emanuel Schegloff, and Jack Sidnell can be applied to L. catta social interaction. Thr...

Charles Darwin suggested that in the evolutionary past, women preferred to mate with musical men. Men made music in order to attract potential mates, and women chose the best musicians to father their children. Geoffrey Miller recently furthered Darwin's suggestions. However, the theories of both researchers are limited by their ethnocentric percep...