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Associate Professor of Anthropology; Director of Undergraduate Studies
Ph.D., UC, Davis 1997.
Email:
Personal Homepage: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/difiore/
Research Interests: Research interests include biological anthropology; primate behavior and ecology; population genetics; South America. Dr. Di Fiore specializes in the comparative behavior, ecology, and population genetics of neotropical primates. His current research projects include a field study of social relationships in woolly and spider monkeys at his field site (Proyecto Primates) in Amazonian Ecuador, collaborative field research on the socioecology of pair-living neotropical primates (including titi monkeys, sakis, and owl monkeys) in Ecuador and Argentina, and molecular studies of population structure and mating systems in many of these primates as well as in red howler monkeys in Venezuela and golden lion tamarins in Brazil.
Affiliations: Member - Center for the Study of Human Origins
Selected Works:
Di Fiore, A. and Suarez, S.A. [in press, 2007]. Route-based travel and shared routes in sympatric spider and woolly monkeys: Cognitive and evolutionary implications. Animal Cognition.
Di Fiore, A., Fernandez-Duque, E., and Hurst, D. [in press, 2007]. Adult male replacement in socially monogamous equatorial saki monkeys (Pithecia aequatorialis). Folia Primatologica.
Di Fiore, A. and Campbell, C.J. 2007. The atelines: Variation in ecology, behavior, and social organization. In: Primates in Perspective (C.J. Campbell, A. Fuentes, K.C. MacKinnon, M. Panger, and S.K. Beader, eds.), pp. 155-185. New York: Oxford University Press.
Di Fiore, A. and Gagneux, P. 2007. Molecular primatology. In: Primates in Perspective (C.J. Campbell, A. Fuentes, K.C. MacKinnon, M. Panger, and S.K. Beader, eds.), pp. 369-393. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Link, A. and Di Fiore, A. 2006. Seed dispersal by spider monkeys and its importance in the maintenance of neotropical rain-forest diversity. Journal of Tropical Ecology 22: 335-346.
Di Fiore, A. 2005. A rapid genetic method for sex assignment in nonhuman primates. Conservation Genetics 6: 1053-1058.
Di Fiore, A. and Fleischer, R.C. 2005. Social behavior, reproductive strategies, and population genetic structure of Lagothrix poeppigii. International Journal of Primatology 26: 1137-1173.
Di Fiore, A. 2004. Diet and feeding ecology of woolly monkeys in a western Amazonian rainforest. International Journal of Primatology 24: 767-801.
Di Fiore, A. and Fleischer, R.C. 2004. Microsatellite markers for woolly monkeys (Lagothrix lagotricha) and their amplification in other New World primates (Primates: Platyrrhini). Molecular Ecology Notes 4: 246-249.
Di Fiore, A. 2003. Molecular genetic approaches to the study of primate behavior, social organization, and reproduction. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 46: 62-99.
Di Fiore, A. 2003. Ranging behavior and foraging ecology of lowland woolly monkeys (Lagothrix lagotricha poeppigii) in Yasuní National Park, Ecuador. American Journal of Primatology 59: 47-66.
Di Fiore, A. 2002. Predator sensitive foraging in ateline primates. In: Eat or Be Eaten: Predator Sensitive Foraging among Primates (L.E. Miller, ed.), pp. 242-267. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [8]
Di Fiore, A. and Rodman, P.S. 2001. Time allocation patterns of lowland woolly monkeys (Lagothrix lagotricha poeppigii) in a neotropical terra firma forest. International Journal of Primatology 22: 449:480. Current News / Projects
Updated July 2009 It’s a beautiful, midsummer Saturday in NYC, not too hot, not too cold, and I’m sitting in the park watching our girls bike away the afternoon – in a few minutes, we’ll leave to hit the Thompson Street pool to cool off before dinner. I am just back from a busy but fun summer field season, which marked the end of another full year. This may be the first time I’ve been in NYC at this time of year, and despite all the warnings folks have given me about the hot, humid dog days of August, SO FAR the NYC summer has been gorgeous with lots of impressive East Coast thunderstorms that put even those in the Amazon to shame.
We had a pretty large crew in Ecuador again this summer: Two students from the University of Pennsylvania (Cara McGuinness and Andrea Spence-Aizenberg) and two volunteers from Colombia (Ricardo Arango and Lina Valencia), joined NYU graduate student Chris Schmitt, NYU undergraduate Kenny Chiou, our new field manager Dan Essiambre, and me for ongoing fieldwork on multiple species of monkeys. Cara, Andrea, and Dan are working on the “comparative monogamy” project that I run with Dr. Eduardo Fernandez-Duque, looking at male-female interactions and patterns of paternal care in sakis and titi monkeys. They’ve made impressive progress in habituating another group of titi monkeys for behavioral work and, especially, in collecting fecal samples from the monkeys for hormone work to look at female reproductive cycles and male testosterone levels. It’s no mean feat to find pea-sized poop pellets among the litter on the forest floor, but they’ve become experts! Kenny is doing his own “poop-searching”, trying to collect samples for hormonal analysis from male and female woolly monkeys for his NYU undergraduate honors thesis. Chris and I, along with help from Ricardo, were focusing on darting and placing radio collars and ID collars on new woolly monkeys in our study groups and on continuing to collect data on ranging patterns, social interactions, and juvenile behavior in woolly and spider monkeys. In a couple of weeks in the field, we affixed five new collars, most importantly putting one on an animal in a new group. And Lina is following up on work with spider monkeys started by grad student Andres Link. We also had a great visit from a colleague, Dr. Filippo Aureli, who spent two weeks with us in the field. Overall, it was a much drier summer in Ecuador than we’ve had in previous years. Usually, we have lots of rain throughout July, and large parts of the territories of some of our study groups flood, but this summer, things stayed relatively dry – well, as dry as it can be in a place where three meters of rain fall a year. Also, it seems like there are lots of new babies around in the study groups, too… since the spring, three of the female spider monkeys in our main study group have given birth, so we’ve newly welcomed ‘Eli’, ‘Lela’, and ‘Summer’ to our study. One final high point: on my way out of the forest in the small canoe, we had a sighting of a JAGUAR on the riverbank – a juvenile, apparently. Actually, I think I am the only one in the boat who didn’t get a good look at it as I was reading (a New Yorker magazine, of all things) when the guides spotted it and didn’t look up in time!
The rest of the year was also a full productive one, with lots of travel and lots of writing. I gave invited talks at the International Primatological Society in Scotland last August (a memorable conference because my luggage caught up with me only one day before I left the UK), at a wonderful ‘mini-conference’ on New World monkeys at the University of Calgary in March (where I had the chance to ski the Canadian Rockies in Banff National Park and catch up with an old grad school colleague, Dr. Drew Rendall… and where I have been colder than EVER BEFORE in my life – minus 23 C the day I left), and at the University of Texas in April (just in time to catch the blue bonnets). I also wrote about four book chapters for various books and a couple of journal articles despite feeling like I never had time to write! I also took a mid-winter trip to the field with a new collaborator, Dr. Tom Igoe, of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts’ Interactive Telecommunications Program. Tom and I met through a mutual friend – another “ballet dad” (thanks to my daughters!) – and found a great shared interest in combining wildlife research with emerging microprocessor and GPS technologies. We recently received two Challenge Grants from NYU to develop and prototype some new interactive collars for use with the monkeys to remotely collect some kinds of data we are interested in (e.g., locations, activity), and the trip was very useful for seeing what might be feasible in the field. I am very excited about working with Tom and his ITP students this year on to develop some innovative new equipment that will help our wildlife research.
In grad student news, things are going well for all of my advisees. My four senior students, Chris Schmitt, Andres Link, Mike Montague, and Alba Morales, are all making great progress on finishing their dissertation research. The next year will be a banner year for that group: Andres and Mike should defend their theses in the next six months, and Chris and Alba should not be far behind. Chris and Alba are currently in the field – Chris on another trip to Peru collecting fecal samples from yellow-tailed woolly monkeys and Alba traveling thought Panama, Honduras, and other parts of Central America (supported by an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant and a grant from Primate Conservation, Inc.) to collect samples for her dissertation work on the phylogeography of Mesoamerican spider monkeys. We’re all looking forward to seeing lots of pictures on their return. Beyond that, Andres and his wife (our former field manager, Gaby de Luna) welcomed their first baby, Manuela, to the world this Spring. CONGRATULATIONS!! My two younger students, are also both doing well. Anand Dacier defended her proposal at the start of the summer and is currently in Brazil scouting out field sites for her work on capuchin communication and group coordination. And new student Paulo Chaves, after an impressive first year in the program, is also off in Brazil doing pilot work collecting fecal samples from muriquis in anticipation of working on the population genetics of that species for his dissertation.
On the family front, my wife, Kristin Phillips, continues to love her work as senior science publicist for the American Museum of Natural History, where she’s now well into her second year. In fact, spurred by one of the paleontologists there, we’re off to go fossil hunting in New Jersey tomorrow, in search of 70-million-year-old shark’s teeth! Our daughters, Gisella and Sofia, finished up their first year at PS 116, Gisella in kindergarten and Sofia in second grade this year, and, with all their neighborhood friends, have just completed a month of GoGreen!, NYU’s environmental summer camp. They have plans to spend the rest of the doing other cool summer activities (first, computer animation camp at the wonderful Children’s Museum of the Arts, then a couple of weeks with their grandparents in Virginia, then a trip with Kristin and me to Austin and the hill country of Texas – with lots of swimming thrown in there). After that, it’s back to NYC for all of us for the academic year to start anew. It’s hard to believe that the new school year is really just around the corner!
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