Near-extinct Gorillas Offer Clues to Family Dynamics in Humans

(PhysOrg.com) -- H. Dieter and Netzin Steklis have been studying mountain gorillas in Rwanda for 15 years, work that has drawn the attention of family studies researchers in the UA Norton School. Their field work will be part of an open house this Friday at McClelland Park.

"Deadbeat dad," "father knows best," "like father like son" - our culture has spun a host of colorful concepts around the father-child relationship, but do they hold up beyond our species?

University of Arizona researchers, along with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, will explore that question during an Oct. 2 event while sharing findings from 15 years of field observations. The event begins at 2 p.m. at McClelland Park.

The event is a special installment of the Frances McClelland Institute's Turbeville Speaker Series and will include a banana split social - a nod, said event organizers, to the apes at the heart of the presentation - research demonstrations in the Norton School's state-of-the-art laboratory and a tour of McClelland Park, one of the newest and most striking buildings on the UA campus.

Gorillas are among just a handful of species in which adult males play with and protect the young.

UA faculty members and internationally acclaimed primatologists H. Dieter Steklis and Netzin Steklis know this fact well. Both have traveled to Rwanda nearly every year since 1991 to study family dynamics in mountain gorillas, of which only about 400 survive in the wild.

H. Dieter Steklis is UA South's associate dean for academic affairs and an adjunct psychology professor while Netzin Steklis, his wife, is an anthropology department lecturer. More information about their work is available at the McClelland Institute's Web site and at Wild Minds.

Both have conducted their research with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International as affiliate scientists, but their studies also has captured the attention of Bruce Ellis, the Norton Endowed Chair in Fathers, Parenting and Families at the Norton School.

"Because this kind of male behavior is so rare among our closest relatives, the great apes, research on gorilla families can help us better understand human families," Ellis said, explaining the impetus to invite the Steklises to bring their research to the Norton School.

In particular, their research may shed some light on how nurturing behavior in adult males can influence offspring survival and life histories, giving us insights into how human families have evolved, Ellis said.

"It is remarkable, for example, that in both human and gorilla families, the timing of female puberty onset appears to be influenced by exposure to non-father males," Netzin Steklis noted.

To surface those insights, Ellis, the Steklises and students can draw on 40 years of gorilla research and observation - a span and depth of data unmatched in research on human families.

"Gorillas are genetically closely related to us," said Dieter Steklis, also Professor Emeritus of Primatology at Rutgers University.

He continued: "They represent one of a very few primate societies in which we can gather this much information on how adult male behaviors play out in families generation after generation."

Titus, a male silverback gorilla who became a "movie star" in the recent film "The Gorilla King," offers a perfect example of the opportunity the gorilla data represents.

"Titus was first observed by Dian Fossey 35 years ago as a newborn," Netzin Steklis explained, noting that his life was captured in field notes and on video up until his death two weeks ago.

"We know from analyses that Titus fathered many offspring, and we can evaluate how his interactions with his young has influence their lives," she said.
The Steklises' work at the Norton School is one expression of the community of scholarship that faculty are working to build in Family and Consumer Sciences said Stephen T. Russell, the Fitch Nesbitt Endowed Chair and director of the School's Frances McClelland Institute for Children, Youth and Families at the UA.

"Our work here hits so many dimensions of the human experience," Russell said. "The Steklises teach psychology and anthropology, but their work presents a great learning opportunity for us - not just for faculty, but for students as well."

In fact, students already are building their own research capacity while advancing the Steklises' work by mastering best-of-breed video analysis software at the Norton School's Lang Children and Family Observation Lab.

The Steklises primate research fosters cross-disciplinary collaborations, and encourages students to expand and shift their thinking to consider novel perspectives on the human condition.

The Norton School's Lang Lab, completed in 2008, represented one of the most compelling aspects of a collaboration with the McClelland Institute, Netzin Steklis said.

"When I learned about the coding software here at the Norton School, I knew this was a win-win opportunity," Steklis said. "We have many hours of video, spanning decades, to analyze and code, and Lang Lab's software and set-up is exactly the one that researchers like us dream about."

Following the Steklises' presentation, students will demonstrate software and coding processes. They will show how computer and viewing stations running the lab's Noldus software allows researchers to watch video and tag a synchronized timeline with notations related to behaviors, sounds and other events on screen.

Visitors also will be treated to a tour of the Lang Lab's "subject rooms" used for conducting experiments, from a large classroom setting to a more intimate living room, as well as standard four-walls-and-a-desk control rooms. The rooms have two-way mirrors for observation, video and audio capture and technologies that detect and record physiological data, such as galvanic skin responses or changes in pulse rate and blood pressure.

Provided by University of Arizona