Stacy Lindshield
Please join me in congratulating Stacy Lindshield, assistant professor of anthropology and principal investigator on a research team that won a $610,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
The group’s three-year project, “Collaborative Research: The Ecological Basis of Hunting and Meat Sharing in Female Savanna Chimpanzees,” is part of the interdisciplinary HUNTRESS (hunting, nutrition, tool use, reproductive ecology, and meat sharing in savanna chimpanzees) project, which assesses female-biased hunting. Sexual selection theory and patterns of male-biased hunting and meat eating for chimpanzees, some of our closest living relatives, have been traditionally integrated with models of human behavioral evolution. However, tool use and female-biased hunting are characteristics of savanna chimpanzees in Senegal. Hunting with tools may enable these females to routinely ingest and share meat on a seasonal basis without the need for being provisioned by males. This project precisely captures the effect of hunting with tools on diet and compares the weight of these findings to the causes and consequences of male-biased trends that characterize most chimpanzee groups studied today.
The HUNTRESS team combines behavioral, isotopic, nutritional, genetic, visual analytic, and geographic approaches to compare hunting and meat ingestion between females and males, and in relation to climate and food availability. This project increases capacity for chimpanzee research in Senegal by fully engaging with and supporting local partners and students. Furthermore, it is part of a long-term program that supports habitat preservation in Senegal for the critically-endangered western chimpanzee.
Co-PIs on the project are Elizabeth Flaherty, associate professor of wildlife ecology and habitat management at Purdue, and Amy Reibman, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue. Other team members are Papa Ibnou Ndiaye (Université Cheikh Anta Diop), Jill Pruetz (Texas State University), and Leslie Knapp (University of Utah).
Congratulations, Dr. Lindshield!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts