@article{13a134e0fcd049248740e1183ba7d108,
title = "Landscapes of Time: Building Long-Term Perspectives in Animal Behavior*",
abstract = "In the 1960s, scientists fascinated by the behavior of free-living animals founded research projects that expanded into multi-generation investigations. This paper charts the history of three scientists{\textquoteright} projects to uncover the varied reasons for investing in a “long-term” perspective when studying animal behavior: Kenneth Armitage's study of marmots in the Rocky Mountains, Jeanne Altmann's analysis of baboons in Kenya, and Timothy Hugh Clutton-Brock's studies (among others) of red deer on the island of Rhum and meerkats in the Kalahari. The desire to study the behavior of the same group of animals over extended periods of time, I argue, came from different methodological traditions – population biology, primatology, and sociobiology – even as each saw themselves as contributing to the legacy of ethology. As scientists embraced and combined these approaches, a small number of long-running behavioral ecology projects like these grew from short pilot projects into decades-long centers of intellectual gravity within behavioral ecology as a discipline. By attending to time as well as place, we can see how this long-term perspective was crucial to their success; they measured evolutionary changes over generations of animals and their data provided insights into how the animals they studied were adapting (or not) to changing local and global environmental factors.",
keywords = "Jeanne Altmann, Kenneth Armitage, Timothy Hugh Clutton-Brock, animal behavior, archive, behavioral ecology, evolution, long-term research",
author = "Milam, {Erika Lorraine}",
note = "Funding Information: Funding for this project was provided by Princeton's University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. I gratefully acknowledge Sophia Gr{\"a}fe and Cora Stuhrmann's invitation to participate in this special issue and their guidance. My research was enabled by key interviews with behavioral ecologists, including Jeanne Altmann, Susan Alberts, Jenny Tung, Beth Archie, Kenneth Armitage, Daniel Blumstein, and Tim Clutton-Brock. I thank members of my lab-ish group at Princeton for talking through nascent ideas – Kate Carpenter, Ingrid Lao, Mikey McGovern, Maia Silber, and Tara Suri – the anonymous reviewers, and the wonderful Chip Burkhardt for his thoughtful advice on this paper and throughout my career. Funding Information: When studies of animal behavior in the wild proliferated, this posed a real problem for scientists seeking to understand how the results from one study compared to those from another, across space, species, and time. Jeanne Altmann's training before her first trip to Kenya had been distinctly mathematical. She began an undergraduate degree in math at UCLA. When her husband obtained a position as an assistant professor at the University of Alberta, she re‐enrolled there as an undergraduate student and finished her degree while attending courses part‐time and tending to their newborn son. Jeanne and Stuart Altmann returned briefly to the Amboseli in 1969 thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation. The landscape had changed dramatically in the five years they had been gone: the fever trees favored by the baboons were greatly reduced in number and the baboon population had decreased by ninety percent. Nevertheless, finding new study populations proved easy. They co‐wrote their analysis of these early observations in a monograph, , published by University of Chicago Press in 1970. They returned to Kenya again the following year, and a continuous record of baboon behavior in Amboseli extends from that moment. 46 Baboon Ecology 47 Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2022 Wiley-VCH GmbH.",
year = "2022",
month = jun,
doi = "10.1002/bewi.202100026",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "45",
pages = "164--188",
journal = "Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte",
issn = "0170-6233",
publisher = "Wiley-VCH Verlag",
number = "1-2",
}