SEMINAR: Correlates of energy balance in wild mountain gorillas

The Seminar: Cyril will present data of the first field study looking at how energy balance and foraging efficiency vary as a function of various socio-ecological factors (dominance rank, group size, reproductive state, habitat etc.) in a folivorous/herbivorous primate. Energy balance of individual females in a wild population of mountain gorillas in Rwanda was measured using observational data of food intake and travel distances as well as measurements of urinary C-peptide concentrations. He also tentatively explores how gorillas respond to and cope with toxins in their diet.

The Speaker: Cyril completed his PhD degree in biological anthropology in 2009 at the University of Zurich/Switzerland, supervised by Prof. Carel van Schaik. His research was aimed at understanding the evolutionary determinants of multilevel societies in primates and included 20 months of observations of wild snub-nosed monkeys in China, complemented with comparative cross-species analyses. Subsequently he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig/Germany and conducted a field study on the feeding ecology of mountain gorillas in Rwanda between 2009 and 2010 in collaboration with the Karisoke Research Center. In April 2011, he took up a position as an Assistant Professor in the School of Anatomy, Physiology & Human Biology, UWA.

His primary research interests include the evolution of primate sociality and the mechanisms that maintain social cohesion. His particular interests revolve around the evolution of “super-” or “ultra-sociality” which describes cases in which individuals of different social units interact and collaborate to varying degrees and in some cases form higher-level groupings such as multilevel societies. He is currently involved in ongoing projects on snub-nosed monkeys in China.