Department News
The Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology embraces education and research on all aspects of biodiversity, including the history of life on earth, evolutionary mechanisms that generate diversity, the ecological context in which all life has evolved, and consequences of interactions among organisms, including humans. Faculty expertise ranges from the tropics to the tundra, from the theoretical to the practical.
Research feature
Pregnant primates miscarry when new male enters group
Pregnant female geladas show an unusually high rate of miscarriage the day after the dominant male in their group is replaced by a new male, a new University of Michigan study indicates.
The "Bruce effect" – in which pregnant females spontaneously miscarry after being exposed to an unfamiliar male – has been found repeatedly in laboratory rodents. However, no conclusive evidence for this effect had ever been demonstrated in a wild population prior to this study. Geladas are Old World monkeys that are close relatives of baboons.
The findings appeared in Science, March 9, 2012. The U-M research examined five years of data collected from a wild population living in the Simien Mountains National Park in Ethiopia.
"The million-dollar question, of course, is how do these females miscarry?" said Professor Jacinta Beehner of the departments of psychology and anthropology, and the study’s lead author. Co-authors include Professor Thore Bergman, EEB and psychology, Amy Lu, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology, and first author Eila Roberts, a psychology graduate student.U-M News Service press release
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