Mewa Singh

A review of Primate Archaeology and Adaptation: A Study of Nicobar Long-Tailed Macaques in India by Jayashree Mazumder. Routledge, 2027. 218 pp.

Dr. Ajith Kumar left us saddened on 1 March 2025, aged 72, in the Satpura hills of central India, while on a field trip with his students. His last day was spent in the same way he spent more than four decades of his career, walking through a forest in the company of young future wildlifers and a pair of binoculars in hand. He was among India’s foremost wildlife biologists. Born in Kerala on 6 June 1952, he took his master’s degree in zoology at the University of Kerala and his doctorate at the University of Cambridge. Over more than forty years of work on the ecology and conservation of primates and small mammals, across the Wildlife Institute of India, the Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the National Centre for Biological Sciences, he helped shape the discipline of wildlife science in this country. His research on the endangered lion-tailed macaque in the rainforests of the Western Ghats influenced a generation of field ecologists and remains a key reference for work on rainforest fragmentation.

Mapping habitat utilization at fine spatio‐temporal scales is essential for understanding various aspects of animal ecology, and for the conservation and management of animal species. A unified approach incorporating habitat structure, composition, and animal activities is necessary for such fine‐scale assessments. Here, we introduce a unified activity‐based habitat utilization model based on simulations of habitat structure and composition, and map the fine‐scale spatio‐temporal habitat utilization of an endangered canopy dwelling primate inhabiting the Western Ghats, the lion‐tailed macaque ( Macaca silenus ). From our simulations, we found that habitat utilization predictions will be enhanced when tree distribution and abundance are combined with height utilization data, compared to when they were assessed independently. This simulation study indicates that for all activities, primary forests provide more suitable habitats for lion‐tailed macaques than plantations. Seasonal variation was observed in habitat suitability due to seasonality in the fruiting of trees, as plantations provided more suitable habitats during monsoon, while primary forests provided more suitable habitats in post monsoon and summer. We observed no locomotion routes with contiguous canopy connectivity in plantations, whereas such routes were common in forests. Our simulation‐based model has implications for understanding many aspects of arboreal ecology, as it incorporates habitat structure and composition. Overall, our simulations reveal that incorporating habitat structure and composition is important for understanding fine‐scale spatio‐temporal habitat utilization of arboreal species, and it can be utilized for the conservation of primates inhabiting tropical habitats, where the collection of field data on trees for large areas can be demanding.

How primates sense, cognize, and respond to death, and are affected by it, are broad research themes within primate thanatology. When primate thanatology adopts a comparative framework, it can illuminate the diversity and evolutionary continuity of psycho‐neuro‐emotional responses to death and dying across primate species, including humans. Evolutionary or comparative thanatology has recently gained momentum, but it lacks methodological consistency, quantitative rigor, and coherent reporting standards. We attempt to address the lack of standardized approaches by introducing an individual‐level comparative framework and employing standard ethological methods, accompanied by well‐defined behavioral variables. We argue that the proposed framework can capture individual‐specific responses to conspecific death and enable hypothesis‐driven studies. The framework is essential to examine the large number of hypotheses that have accumulated in the field.

This study analyses the development and status of the Indian captive population of the endangered lion-tailed macaque with reference to the global historical zoo population of the species. Lion-tailed macaques are endemic to South India and have been kept in zoos globally for more than a hundred years. In the year 2018, the global captive population comprised 516 individuals in 98 zoos spread over 30 countries. Recent studies reveal that the development of the historical and current populations has not been satisfactory due to low productivity and other problems. Our study intends to assess the potential of the Indian subpopulation for conservation breeding and whether it can be used to support the global core European population, and to function as a reserve for the wild population. It is found that the status of the captive population in India is poor and needs improvements in terms of size, structure, keeping systems, and management. We propose that the management of living conditions must consider the most critical aspect, which is the female-bonded social system in lion-tailed macaques. This would support breeding and welfare. To achieve this goal, it is proposed to closely cooperate with the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria’s EAZA Ex-situ Programme (EEP) by exchanging know-how and introducing lion-tailed macaques from the EEP population. The management would profit from training systems for zoo personnel on all levels, with emphasis on the biology of lion-tailed macaques and their adaptive potential under the altered conditions in zoos. It is suggested to have a less centralised management system.

This review describes the main approaches used for working with wild animals in zoos, and briefly traces the history and theoretical background of these approaches. The theoretical background should be considered when current approaches are discussed for the improvement and design of future zoos. Hediger’s individual-based concept of 'Zoo biology' is introduced, followed by a (small) population-oriented approach. Further approaches are presented focusing on animal welfare and behavioural/environmental enrichment concepts. We found that for all approaches, there is a lack of consideration of concepts of evolutionary theory. Lacking these concepts and the divergent backgrounds of the approaches might `account for the management and resulting sustainability problems. Recent management concepts that are based on evolutionary theory, particularly life-history theory, are proposed. The use of these concepts requires a change in paradigm in terms of focusing management and husbandry on the individual phenotypes (the units of natural selection) that constitute a population, instead of focusing on populations as assemblies of genotypes. It is proposed that a paradigm change can support the development of a comprehensive and integrated management approach that would be more compatible with all critical aspects of the biology of the animals and treat them on the same level of importance. Since reproduction is central to evolutionary theory, the new paradigm would particularly emphasise the management of the reproductive biology of the species, and thus support breeding.

The expansion of linear infrastructures, such as roads, which are integral to human society, poses a serious threat to wildlife, leading to road accidents, which have become major causes of terrestrial and avian wildlife mortality worldwide. This study, conducted from June 2023 to May 2024 in the Nelliyampathy Hills, Western Ghats, Kerala, India aimed to assess terrestrial and avian vertebrate roadkill, and the environmental parameters influencing it. In 22 roadkill surveys, 330 roadkills were recorded, representing 72 species, that included 228 individuals of reptiles (43 species) (66.09%), 70 amphibian individuals (11 species) (20.29%), 23 mammal individuals (10 species) (9.57%), and 9 bird individuals (8 species) (4.06%). The annual roadkill estimate was 5,490 along a 50 km transect, with an overall roadkill rate of 0.3 roadkills/km/year. Environmental factors such as plantations, road pavement, water sources, terrain, and undergrowth were found to significantly influence roadkill occurrences. However, there was negligible spatial and seasonal variation in roadkill hotspots. This communication presents advisory measures to reduce wildlife mortality from vehicle collisions to support ecosystem health and minimize such wildlife mortality.

Habitat degradation poses a critical threat to the Malabar slender loris (Loris lydekkerianus malabaricus), yet little is known about its microhabitat requirements in intact forest. In Aralam Wildlife Sanctuary, we combined nocturnal trail surveys (337 loris sightings) with plotless sampling of 2830 trees (86 species from 35 families) to characterize both vegetation structure and loris presence. Our results show that lorises occur almost exclusively in mildly degraded wet evergreen and secondary moist deciduous subcanopies, where understory trees and climber networks provide continuous pathways. Individuals are most often encountered at heights of 5–15 m—ascending into higher strata as the night progresses—reflecting a balance between foraging access and predator avoidance. Substrate analysis revealed strong preferences for twigs ≤ 1 cm (36.98%) and small branches 2–5 cm in diameter, oriented obliquely to minimize energetic costs and maintain stability during slow, deliberate arboreal locomotion. Day-sleeping sites were overwhelmingly located within dense tangles of lianas on large-girth trees, where intertwined stems and thorny undergrowth offer concealment from both mammalian and avian predators. Vegetation surveys documented a near-equal mix of evergreen (50.6%) and deciduous (49.4%) species—including 26 endemics (18 restricted to the Western Ghats)—with Aporosa cardiosperma emerging as the most abundant riparian pioneer, suggesting both ecological resilience and potential simplification in fragmented patches. Complementing field observations, our recent habitat-suitability modeling in Aralam indicates that broad-scale climatic and anthropogenic factors—precipitation patterns, elevation, and proximity to roads—are the strongest predictors of loris occupancy, underscoring the interplay between landscape-level processes and microhabitat structure. Together, these findings highlight the imperative of multi-strata forest restoration—planting insect-hosting native trees, maintaining continuous canopy and climber networks, and integrating small “mini-forest” modules—to recreate the structural complexity vital for slender loris conservation and the broader resilience of Western Ghats biodiversity.

Habitat degradation poses a critical threat to the Malabar slender loris (Loris lydekkerianus malabaricus), yet little is known about its microhabitat requirements in intact forest. In Aralam Wildlife Sanctuary, we combined nocturnal trail surveys (337 first-contact trees) with plotless sampling of 2,830 trees (86 species from 35 families) to characterize both vegetation structure and loris presence. Our results show that lorises occur almost exclusively in mildly degraded wet-evergreen and secondary moist-deciduous subcanopy, where understory trees and climber networks provide continuous pathways. Individuals are most often encountered at heights of 5–15 m—ascending into higher strata as the night progresses—reflecting a balance between foraging access and predator avoidance. Substrate analysis revealed strong preferences for twigs ≤ 1 cm (36.98 %) and small branches 2–5 cm in diameter, oriented obliquely to minimize energetic costs and maintain stability during slow, deliberate arboreal locomotion. Day-sleeping sites were overwhelmingly located within dense tangles of lianas on large-girth trees, where intertwined stems and thorny undergrowth offer concealment from both mammalian and avian predators. Vegetation surveys documented a near-equal mix of evergreen (50.6 %) and deciduous (49.4 %) species—including 26 endemics (18 restricted to the Western Ghats)—with Aporosa cardiosperma emerging as the most abundant riparian pioneer, suggesting both ecological resilience and potential simplification in fragmented patches. Complementing field observations, our recent habitat-suitability modelling in Aralam indicates that broad-scale climatic and anthropogenic factors—precipitation patterns, elevation, and proximity to roads—are the strongest predictors of loris occupancy, underscoring the interplay between landscape-level processes and microhabitat structure. Together, these findings highlight the imperative of multi-strata forest restoration—planting insect-hosting native trees, maintaining continuous canopy and climber networks, and integrating small “mini-forest” modules—to recreate the structural complexity vital for slender loris conservation and the broader resilience of Western Ghats biodiversity.