[Taxacom] Fwd: competition on Peleng (actually versus two species of cuscus)

Michael Heads m.j.heads at gmail.com
Wed Jun 20 06:33:58 CDT 2018 

On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 11:06 AM, Michael Heads <m.j.heads at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Ken,
>
> Monkeys range east only to Sulawesi, while the only primates east of there
> are tarsiers on the interesting chain of islands: Peleng, Siau and
> Sangihe. The cuscuses Strigocuscus and Ailurops are both on Sulawesi
> and Peleng, Strigo. is also on Siau and Sangihe. Why would the cuscuses
> prevent monkeys establishing on Peleng, Siau and Sangihe by competition
> when they all live together on Sulawesi?
>
> A closely related question is why and how tarsiers are on Peleng, Siau and
> Sangihe. The expert on this group, Myron Shekelle, admitted that 'How
> tarsiers ever came to these islands is a mystery'. Also, why are
> tarsiers on *these *islands, but not further east?
>
> The islands in this 'tarsier belt' - Peleng, Siau and Sangihe - are
> geographically insignificant, but form one of the most interesting areas in
> the world for biogeographers and geologists (distributions and geology in
> the region are illustrated in Figs. 5-15 and 5-16 of my Tropics book). E.g.
> apart from the tarsiers it has one of the highest densities of
> endemic birds in the world. Why? Many of the birds are related to groups
> further east (including eastern New Guinea groups, 1000s of km away), not
> to groups on the much closer Sulawesi. The geology is also very unusual - the
> Sangihe and Halmahera arcs are undergoing the only active arc collision on
> Earth. Most biogeographers understand that at a subduction zone, such as
> the Sangihe SZ, the plates move towards each other. What many
> biogeographers do not understand is that active subduction zones (producing
> islands) themselves often move long distances, at rates of ~10cm/yr.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 2:30 PM, Kenneth Kinman <kinman at hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>>        I am still catching up on the changing taxonomy of the cuscuses.
>> Back when I was working on our 1st Edition of the reference book "Mammal
>> Species of the World" (1st Edition, by Honacki, Kinman, and Koeppl, 1982),
>> Strigocuscus was included within genus Phalanger, but genetic data since
>> then has apparently shown them to be in separate subfamilies.
>>
>>       In any case, although the species of Strigocuscus on Sulawesi and
>> Peleng Island is a "pygmy" species, the other species on Peleng is a more
>> normal size.  I had overlooked is that the bear cuscus is also on Peleng
>> Island.  So any monkey trying to become established on Peleng Island would
>> have faced two species of well-established species of cuscuses.
>>
>>       So it is even less surprising that monkeys did not expand east of
>> Sulawesi.  The battle ground between monkeys and marsupial cuscuses seems
>> most intense between Sulawesi and nearby Peleng Island.  This battleground
>> in Wallacea seems to have favored cuscus over monkeys, even though they
>> managed to coexist on the westernmost Wallacean island of Sulawesi.  Just a
>> matter of Sulawesi being a larger island with more competition allowing a
>> stalemate of sorts.  Both monkeys and cuscuses survived there, but not
>> further east, and cuscuses did not survive further west.  Something that
>> neither Wallace's Line nor Weber's Line seems to have anticipated.
>>
>>                             -----Ken Kinman
>>
>> P.S. When cuscuses were first discovered they were thought to be a
>> species monkey.  So similar to monkeys in their form, habitat, and food
>> sources, but only the discovery that cuscuses were pouched marsupials did
>> their true relationship become known.  I'm not sure if you could say that
>> they are more like monkeys or lemurs.  In any case, monkeys would have met
>> their match in both Madagascar (versus lemurs) and east of Sulawesi (versus
>> the two species of cuscuses).
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> *From:* Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> on behalf of
>> Kenneth Kinman <kinman at hotmail.com>
>> *Sent:* Monday, June 18, 2018 8:54 AM
>> *To:* Michael Heads; taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
>> *Subject:* Re: [Taxacom] competition on Peleng (was: Jurassic
>> primates???)
>>
>> Hi Michael,
>>
>>        Well, I was talking about monkeys in general, but even with
>> macaques, I would think a male cuscus could take on a female macaque.  When
>> I talk about transoceanic dispersal of primates, I am usually thinking
>> about of a group of pregnant females.  No adult males required, as long as
>> one or more of the females are pregnant with male offspring.
>>
>>      Such a group of pregnant female monkeys landing on a small island
>> like Peleng that has a well-established cuscus population could have a very
>> rough time trying to get established.  If not killed by male cuscuses, the
>> cuscuses could drive the pregnant monkeys away from the best food sources
>> (and they just die from malnutrition).  Likewise, cuscuses haven't spread
>> further east because monkeys were already well established there.
>>
>>       Monkeys introduced by humans in New Guinea is a different story.
>> They get established around human habitations and then spread out from
>> there.  And there is a lot more territory than on a small island like
>> Peleng.
>>
>>                      --------------Ken
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: Michael Heads <m.j.heads at gmail.com>
>> Sent: Monday, June 18, 2018 2:09 AM
>> To: Kenneth Kinman
>> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] competition on Peleng (was: Jurassic primates???)
>>
>> Hi Ken,
>>
>> You say: 'Cuscuses are a very monkey-like marsupial', and suggest that
>> they prevented monkeys from establishing east of Sulawesi.
>>
>> I know cuscuses and monkeys quite well (I lived for a long time in Africa
>> and in New Guinea) and I wouldn'y describe them as very similar at all
>> really - for a start, the monkeys concerned (macaques) are at least twice
>> the size of a cuscus, much smarter and much more aggressive.  But in any
>> case, New Guinea is very rich in cuscuses and, as I mentioned, introduced
>> monkeys have established there with no problems.
>>
>>    I'm sure you can think up an ad hoc reason for that particular
>> phenomenon, but I prefer to look at the group, and all its biogeographic
>> boundaries, overall. As Edgar Allan Poe said, 'the ingenious are always
>> fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic'.
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 2:49 PM, Kenneth Kinman <kinman at hotmail.com
>> <mailto:kinman at hotmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Michael,
>>
>>       Sulawesi and Peleng (being in the western part of "Wallacea") are
>> an interesting battleground between the Asian and Australian faunas.  In
>> answer to your question, I suspect that monkeys could have encountered
>> competitive exclusion on Peleng by a combination of not only the tarsiers
>> there, but even more so by the marsupial species Strigocuscus pelengensis.
>> This marsupial is also in the Sula Islands, which might also explain why
>> monkeys didn't get into the Molucca Islands either (although a greater
>> distance gap might also explain that).
>>
>>       The other species of Strigocuscus does live on Sulawesi, but being
>> called a dwarf cuscus, I assume it is smaller (and therefore less
>> competitive and aggressive) than the species on Peleng.  So I would say
>> that studying the possible battle between the cuscus marsupials and monkeys
>> in western Wallacea (especially on Peleng) could be far more fruitful than
>> just tarsiers vs. monkeys.  It could be a combination of both battles in
>> this transition zone.
>>
>>       The males of cuscuses in particular can be quite aggressive.  And
>> the cuscus on Peleng (presumably being larger than those on Sulawesi and
>> being on a much smaller island) might be the main reason any attempted
>> monkey dispersals would fail.  Probably more so than tarsiers.  Cuscuses
>> are a very monkey-like marsupial.
>>
>>                                 -----------------Ken Kinman
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: Michael Heads <m.j.heads at gmail.com<mailto:m.j.heads at gmail.com>>
>> Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2018 6:31 PM
>> To: Kenneth Kinman
>> Cc: Taxacom
>> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Jurassic primates???
>>
>> Hi Ken,
>>
>> Mesozoic mammal fossils are very different from modern groups, and their
>> affinities are often very controversial or simply admitted as unknown. If
>> modern morphological work identified the phylogenetic position of groups
>> such as cetaceans incorrectly - when the vast wealth of morphological
>> information was available from complete specimens - isn't it very likely
>> that they have misidentified many, fragmentary Mesozoic fossil groups in
>> which the key features are not preserved?
>>
>> Did you see the lizard paper I mentioned (pushing back dates by 75 m.y.)?
>> Do you agree with my earlier statement that Goswami & Upchurch's reasoning
>> is illogical (they wrote that fossils provide minimum ages, but then
>> treated the fossil age of eutherians as a maximum age for primates)? Also,
>> you haven't said which examples of vicariance you accept.
>>
>> Some other 'extraordinary' evidence for primates:
>> Monkeys are diverse on Philippines/Sulawesi, but they reach their limit
>> there and are entirely absent from islands to the east, such as Peleng, 20
>> km off eastern Sulawesi, the Moluccas etc. If monkeys dispersed across the
>> Atlantic long after it opened, why would a 20 km strait block their
>> dispersal?
>>
>> Peleng is a small island, so you might think that large monkeys could not
>> exist there. But macaques are famously 'weedy' and Peleng is the same size
>> as Zanzibar (30 km off the African mainland), which has endemic monkeys.
>>
>> You might hypothesize that the tarsiers on Peleng prevented the monkeys
>> from establishing there by competition, but monkeys and tarsiers overlap
>> through most of the tarsiers' range.
>>
>> You might suggest that islands east of Philippines/Sulawesi are
>> ecologically unsuitable for some other reason, but monkeys introduced to
>> Palau and to western New Guinea have thrived and are now pests.
>>
>> Of course, the 'extraordinary' break between Sulawesi and Peleng could
>> just be due to the vagaries of chance dispersal, but wouldn't it be useful
>> to investigate other possibilities?
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Dunedin, New Zealand.
>
> My books:
>
> *Biogeography and evolution in New Zealand. *Taylor and Francis/CRC, Boca
> Raton FL. 2017.  https://www.routledge.com/Biogeography-and-Evolution-in-
> New-Zealand/Heads/p/book/9781498751872
>
>
> *Biogeography of Australasia:  A molecular analysis*. Cambridge
> University Press, Cambridge. 2014. www.cambridge.org/9781107041028
>
>
> *Molecular panbiogeography of the tropics. *University of California
> Press, Berkeley. 2012. www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520271968
>
>
> *Panbiogeography: Tracking the history of life*. Oxford University Press,
> New York. 1999. (With R. Craw and J. Grehan). http://books.google.
> co.nz/books?id=Bm0_QQ3Z6GUC
> <http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=Bm0_QQ3Z6GUC&dq=panbiogeography&source=gbs_navlinks_s>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>


-- 
Dunedin, New Zealand.

My books:

*Biogeography and evolution in New Zealand. *Taylor and Francis/CRC, Boca
Raton FL. 2017.
https://www.routledge.com/Biogeography-and-Evolution-in-New-Zealand/Heads/p/book/9781498751872


*Biogeography of Australasia:  A molecular analysis*. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge. 2014. www.cambridge.org/9781107041028


*Molecular panbiogeography of the tropics. *University of California Press,
Berkeley. 2012. www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520271968


*Panbiogeography: Tracking the history of life*. Oxford University Press,
New York. 1999. (With R. Craw and J. Grehan).
http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=Bm0_QQ3Z6GUC
<http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=Bm0_QQ3Z6GUC&dq=panbiogeography&source=gbs_navlinks_s>

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