ReviewFrontiers in zoology2015
Eco-evo-devo of the lemur syndrome: did adaptive behavioral plasticity get canalized in a large primate radiation?
Review in Frontiers in zoology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 89 citations in OpenAlex.
- Of Monsters and Monkeys: Queering the Study of Genetic Chimerism in Primates.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Individualised niches: an integrative conceptual framework across behaviour, ecology, and evolution.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Sexual selection drives sex difference in adult life expectancy across mammals and birds.Science advances · 2025Article
- The evolution of male-female dominance relations in primate societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Prenatal sex determination illuminates the unusual adult sex ratio of a group-living lemur.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Propithecus verreauxi demography spanning 40 years at Bezà Mahafaly Special Reserve, southwest Madagascar.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Contagious yawning and scratching in captive lemurs.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Benefits but not the dual functions of submissive signals differ between two Malagasy primates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Male-biased dominance in greater bamboo lemurs (Primate biology · 2024Article
- Evolutionary Patterns of Intersexual Power.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Long-term female bias in sex ratios across life stages of Harpy Eagle, a large raptor exhibiting reverse sexual size dimorphism.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Coevolution of social and communicative complexity in lemurs.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Sex bias in intergroup conflict and collective movements among social mammals: male warriors and female guides.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Nine Levels of Explanation : A Proposed Expansion of Tinbergen's Four-Level Framework for Understanding the Causes of Behavior.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2021Article
- Selection on adaptive and maladaptive gene expression plasticity during thermal adaptation to urban heat islands.Nature communications · 2021Article
- The energy allocation trade-offs underlying life history traits in hypometabolic strepsirhines and other primates.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Article
- Mid-Cenozoic climate change, extinction, and faunal turnover in Madagascar, and their bearing on the evolution of lemurs.BMC evolutionary biology · 2020Article
- Morphometric signals of population decline in diademed sifakas occupying degraded rainforest habitat in Madagascar.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Evolutionary dynamics of sexual size dimorphism in non-volant mammals following their independent colonization of Madagascar.Scientific reports · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundComprehensive explanations of behavioral adaptations rarely invoke all levels famously admonished by Niko Tinbergen. The role of developmental processes and plasticity, in particular, has often been neglected. In this paper, we combine ecological, physiological and developmental perspectives in developing a hypothesis to account for the evolution of 'the lemur syndrome', a combination of reduced sexual dimorphism, even adult sex ratios, female dominance and mild genital masculinization characterizing group-living species in two families of Malagasy primates.
resultsWe review the different components of the lemur syndrome and compare it with similar adaptations reported for other mammals. We find support for the assertion that the lemur syndrome represents a unique set of integrated behavioral, demographic and morphological traits. We combine existing hypotheses about underlying adaptive function and proximate causation by adding a potential developmental mechanism linking maternal stress and filial masculinization, and outline an evolutionary scenario for its canalization.
conclusionsWe propose a new hypothesis linking ecological, physiological, developmental and evolutionary processes to adumbrate a comprehensive explanation for the evolution of the lemur syndrome, whose assumptions and predictions can guide diverse future research on lemurs. This hypothesis should also encourage students of other behavioral phenomena to consider the potential role of developmental plasticity in evolutionary innovation.
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