Primate Visual System Essay

The human brain is capable of perceiving and interpreting information or stimuli received through the sense organs (i.e., eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin) (Weiten, 1998). This ability to perceive and interpret stimulus allows the human being to make meaningful sense of the world and environment around them. However, even as the human being is able to perceive and interpret stimuli information through all sense organs, stimuli is most often or primarily interpreted using the visual (eyes) and auditory (ears) sense organs (Anderson, 2009). However, for the purpose of this paper, the visual information process will be examined.

A few weeks ago, I spent a lovely Monday afternoon observing two different primates at the Santa Ana Zoo. I got to the zoo around two in the afternoon, and to my surprise, the zoo was decently crowded. The Santa Ana Zoo is smaller in comparison to other zoos like the Los Angeles Zoo, but still had a decent amount of animals there. Covering a small 20 acres of land, I came across two primates that fit perfectly for the purposes of this course project. I chose to observe an endangered ape, the white-handed gibbon, and an endangered new world monkey, the golden-headed lion tamarin.

What makes a primate a primate? A primate is defined by its many incredible features. A primate is a mammal that has certain characteristics such as: flexible fingers and toes, opposable thumbs, flatter face than other mammals, eyes that face forward and spaced close together, large and complex cerebrum, and social animals. What makes a primate a primate is its characteristics. Some of the physical features primates are identified by is their teeth, snouts, eyes, ears, arms, legs, fingers, and toes. Human evolution is a big part of humans being primates, and having similar features and characteristics make humans to be considered to be a primate, but both humans and non-humans have differences.

Within this essay, we will study more in depth the behavioral as well as physical traits of two primates at a zoo from their interaction with their peers to their place in the group. This observation would enable us to further understand the possible existing correlation between humans and primates. First, I studied a female chimpanzee with her baby, and then, a dominant male gorilla, in San Francisco Zoo at about noon, on May 23, 2015, for an hour each. Even though they share some similarities such as having a large brain, living for a long time, and being bored in their enclosure, they are still different; when gorillas are the largest, chimpanzees are the smartest. In fact, chimps use tools to catch food, they would not be able to reach

One has probably heard the simile, “you must be blind as a bat!” Well in fact, this statement is false, bats are not blind. Formally known in the mammal family as Chiroptera, bats can be split into two sub orders known as mega-bats (flying foxes or fruit bats) and micro-bats. Typically, when bats are thought of it is commonly known to have the characteristics of having echolocation, or sonar vision, to aid detection of objects in complete darkness. As illustrated in Figure 1, echolocation is the use of sound waves made by the contraction of the larynx, these waves are then reflected back from the moving object to signal the bat.

They are very fast and can be able to run within short distances using the most minimal time. It takes less than 10 seconds to run within a distance of approximately 100 meters. While the animals move around they try to monitor the environment as quadrupedally and monitoring of the environment can be able to take as much as up to ten minutes in any case they have doubts of where they are, this alerts them of any predators. Consortship is a situation where the two animals would stay close to each other and monitor the movement and environment of each other. This is done as long as the animals are out in an environment that is not seen as being friendly. The patas can be seen to be less vocal and they move around in silence, they make certain noise only once when they have seen a predator. The noise or the sound takes just a few seconds as long as the danger is taken away

The primates species that I observed were the Bornean orangutans and the Sumatran orangutans. There were three adult females. one adult male, and one infant female. The orangutans were observed at San Diego zoo’s ape webcam on April 26, 2106.

Through this assignment, we will see how primates express their behaviors and understand the meaning behind them. For my observation, it will be based on the orangutans, which is classified in the genus Pongo. The San Diego zoo itself is set up with a lot of ropes, balls, hammocks, rocks and more for the animal to interact with in the grassy area. There are many levels of ground elevations that allowed the primate to have maximum space to explore around and live in. After seeing how the specie interacts and behaves, I can relate it to human behaviors and how we gain our roots from them. One of the small orangutans I observed was very active and kept climbing on different levels of the ropes and interacted with many other of the inhabitants.

Joseph Henrich began, A Puzzling Primate, by describing how physically inept human beings are when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. He continues with this logic when he demonstrates, that humans in this era, would not be able to survive if placed in the wild forest environment. Due to the biological weakness of humans, culture became a necessary defense mechanism and a form of protection. Culture became a unique way for humans to adapt. Despite the obvious physical weakness of humans, through culture we have rose to be the dominant species.

Primates have been evolving for millions of years and during this time they have adapted into ecosystems in which they live in. Through the process of primate evolution, the most significant impact was their changes in body structure and locomotion. Evolution is the process by which different kinds of living organisms are thought to have developed and diversified from earlier forms during the history of the earth. Improving body structures and speed of movement made it possible for the primates to escape predators and survive hostile environments. Throughout the Epoch of Cenozoic Grades, primates developed four different types of locomotion in order to adapt to the new environment.

One of the most variable aspects of the eyes in primates is the sclera. The sclera in primates comes in multiple different pigments and SSI as seen in figure 2. In research on human eyes, evidence concludes that through the sclera, health, age and emotion can be detected; redden or yellow sclera detects decreased health, increased age, and even emotions of sadness or irritation, whereas bright white sclera represents increased overall health [4]. The true purpose for the evolution of the sclera is not completely clear, but many implications can be made to help researchers better understand the complex evolution of the eye. One of the major topics for research on the eye is the discovery that the purpose of the white sclera is to amplify gaze direction whereas the darker colored sclera is to do the opposite; hide gaze direction from predators [5]. Not only can the sclera help detect emotion and gaze but is a major factor in the evolution of communication between primates.

Humans have a unique and wonderful device in how one sees. The eye and brain work together to turn the world into visual data one’s brain can understand and use. There are some eye conditions that inhibit the sight or the recognition of the shapes one sees. Research continues to overcome these conditions as well as to further understand the biochemical reaction that gives humans the sight and understanding one has of visual data. Included in the paper are some of the latest research methods.

For many years, scientists discovered that the animal kingdom have an incredible diversity of vision. “For example, the bee’s eye produces neural image very similar to that of the human eye but with much worse resolution.” (Nilsson, 1989, p. 298). In addition, Nilsson (1989) shows that the bee’s eyes also detect “polarization of light in the sky and provides color information” (p. 298). Nilsson’s (1989) stated that the primary purpose of an image-forming apparatus in the eye is to

Periodic spontaneous activity is found in many parts of the developing central nervous system including the spinal cord, cortex, hippocampus and retina, and evidence suggests that this activity could underlie aspects of development such as axon guidance, local circuit formation and establishment of sensory maps (Feller, 1999). In the retina, this phenomenon has been studied in detail because its circuitry is stereotypic and its activity can be manipulated easily in development. Before eye opening, retinal circuits undergo a great deal of maturation and refinement. The immature circuits spontaneously generate propagating bursts of action potentials called retinal waves. Retinal waves correlate the firing of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) and play a role in establishing and refining circuits in the visual system, but there is a great deal of controversy about whether waves play an "instructive" or a "permissive" role in neuronal development. The term instructive implies that retinal activity contains information that affects the formation of synaptic connections, while the term permissive implies that activity is necessary at some minimum level in order for the refinement to occur. This review will focus on the role of retinal waves on three aspects of visual system development – eye-specific segregation in the thalamus, retinotopic refinement in the superior colliculus, and establishment of cortical columns – and summarize the existing arguments for the role of retinal waves

Normal vision occurs by a coordinated synthesis of the retinal images into a single brain image. If, however, one of the eyes does not transmit a coordinated or useful image the brain may choose to ignore this image when conducting its synthesis. The region of the