The Amboseli Baboon Project is a long-term, individual-based research project on yellow baboons (''Papio cynocephalus'') in the Amboseli basin of southern

Kenya Kenya, officially the Republic of Kenya, is a country located in East Africa. With an estimated population of more than 52.4 million as of mid-2024, Kenya is the 27th-most-populous country in the world and the 7th most populous in Africa. ...

. Founded in 1971, it is one of the longest-running studies of a wild primate in the world. Research at the Amboseli Baboon Project centers on processes at the individual, group, and population levels, and in recent years has also included other aspects of

baboon Baboons are primates comprising the biology, genus ''Papio'', one of the 23 genera of Old World monkeys, in the family Cercopithecidae. There are six species of baboon: the hamadryas baboon, the Guinea baboon, the olive baboon, the yellow ba ...

biology, such as genetics, hormones, nutrition, hybridization, parasitology, and relations with other species. The project is affiliated with the Department of

Ecology Ecology () is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their Natural environment, environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community (ecology), community, ecosystem, and biosphere lev ...

and

Evolutionary Biology Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes such as natural selection, common descent, and speciation that produced the diversity of life on Earth. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biolo ...

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

, th
Department of Biology
and th
Evolutionary Anthropology Department
at

Duke University Duke University is a Private university, private research university in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity, North Carolina, Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1 ...

, th
Department of Biological Sciences
at the

University of Notre Dame The University of Notre Dame du Lac (known simply as Notre Dame; ; ND) is a Private university, private Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana, United States. Founded in 1842 by members of the Congregation of Holy Cross, a Cathol ...

, and th
Department of Primate Behavior and Evolution
at the

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (, shortened to MPI EVA) is a research institute based in Leipzig, Germany, that was founded in 1997. It is part of the Max Planck Society network. Well-known scientists currently based at ...

. The Amboseli Baboon Project is based in the

Amboseli National Park Amboseli National Park, formerly Maasai Amboseli Game Reserve, is a national park in Loitoktok District in Kajiado County, Kenya. It is in size at the core of an ecosystem that spreads across the Kenya-Tanzania border. It harbours 400 species ...

and southwestern parts of the

Amboseli Amboseli National Park, formerly Maasai Amboseli Game Reserve, is a national park in Loitoktok District in Kajiado County, Kenya. It is in size at the core of an ecosystem that spreads across the Kenya-Tanzania border. It harbours 400 species ...

ecosystem, near

Kilimanjaro Mount Kilimanjaro () is a dormant volcano in Tanzania. It is the highest mountain in Africa and the highest free-standing mountain above sea level in the world, at above sea level and above its plateau base. It is also the highest volcano i ...

. Its primary research camp is based on the southern border of Amboseli National Park, near the former Olgulului Public Campsite.

Background

The initial study of the project ran in 1963 - 1964, with a brief follow-up study in 1969. These laid the groundwork for the long-term, coordinated project which began in 1971. Since then, individually recognized baboons within the study groups have been followed on a near-daily basis. The project was founded by Stuart Altmann and Jeanne Altmann (member of the

United States National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

Present day

The project is currently co-directed by

Susan Alberts Susan C. Alberts is an American primatologist, anthropologist, and biologist who is the current Chair of the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University; previously, she served as a Bass fellow and the Robert F. Durden Professor ...

Beth Archie
an

The majority of the project's observational data are collected by long-term field observers in Kenya. Its funding has come from a number of sources over the years, including the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in 1887 and is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Service ...

, and the

. The software developed by the project to manage the collected data, Babase, is produced with

Open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

and is itself Open-source software and available to the public. Over the period of its existence The Amboseli Baboon Project has produced over 230 peer-reviewed articles, reports, and popular accounts.

Discoveries

* Close social relationships among females improve their offsprings' chance of survival * Young baboons who grow up without a father reach adulthood more slowly * Mothers with low social status have sons with higher baseline stress levels * Male baboons seem to identify their offspring and support them in conflicts * Alpha and low-ranking males experience high stress, while beta males do not

References

{{Reflist

External links

Amboseli Baboon ProjectBabase: The Babase System Technical SpecificationsBabase Chado: Chado and it's Integration with the Babase System
Amboseli National Park Princeton University Duke University University of Notre Dame