Good morning,
Today’s forecast calls for a sunny day with a high temperature of sixty-seven degrees.
Book fairs continue at Lakeview School and the middle school.
There’s a tech park board meeting today, at 9 a.m. The agenda is available online. Everyone attending has something better he could be doing. The city’s real problems are elsewhere.
There’s an interesting, if unexpected, story on markets in the animal world posted at sciencenews.org: Will groom for snuggles: Market forces govern a baby’s value among vervet monkeys and sooty mangabeys.
“Do my hair before you touch my baby” is the rule among mother vervet monkeys and sooty mangabeys when it comes to sharing their infants with their neighbors.
Like some other primate infants, monkey babies attract crowds of females eager to touch, hold and make silly lip-smacking noises at the little ones, says primatologist Cécile Fruteau of Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Her novel study of infant-touching etiquette in the vervets and mangabeys adds them to the short list of animals known to have “markets” for baby fondling. The moms have to be groomed for a sufficient time before they let the groomer touch the baby.
What makes this exchange a market is the way sufficient grooming time changes with the baby supply, Fruteau and her colleagues explain in a paper now posted online in Animal Behaviour. The price for access to a group’s solitary infant, measured in grooming time for mom, fell when other females gave birth and increased the number of little cuties available for cuddling.
C. Fruteau et al. Infant access and handling in sooty mangabeys and vervet monkeys. Animal Behaviour. doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.09.028.