Contact
Responsabilités dans l'unité
Responsable MNHN et CNRS de la communication de l'UMR 7206
Représentante des MC/CR de l'UMR 7206
Présentation
Shelly Masi, primatologue | Les acteurs du musée-laboratoire
UPDATED SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS: https://scholar.google.fr/citations...
A SNAPSHOT
Associate/Assistant Professor (Maître de conférences) at the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) in Paris, France. My current research aims at undestanding the flexibility of foraging strategies and of the cognitive behaviour of great apes focusing on four main research lines : 1) animal nutritional and energetic needs, 2) feeding ecology and nutritional strategies in realtion to spatio-temporal availability of food, 3) health status and medicinal plant choice, 4) feeding traditions, social learning, feeding knowladge transmission and culture. My field work profits from the tight collaboration with the Aka pygmies, hunter-gathers, forest experts and gorilla trackers, for whom I had to learn the Central African language to be able to communicate and work together. A recent research line of mine includes studies on the Aka pygmies given their intriguing hunter-gather life style and their traditional use of forest plants for medicine and other usages. My research has been focussing mainly on the western gorillas, elusive and critically endangered species. However, I stongly believe that the comparative approch among species, including humans, and especially among disciplins, is the only way to fully address our research questions.
Therefore, today thanks to a large network of strong national and international collaborations, my reseach framework compares different primate species (inlcuding humans) integrating field, captive and experimental research with a multidisciplinary approch (e.g. socioecology, feeding ecology, cognition, spatial geography, health, conservation, physiology, botany, anthropôlogy, ethnology, genetic, neurocognition). Focusing on primates and particularly on our closest relatives, the great apes, the ultimate goal of my research is to shed light a) on resilience of endangered species to aid their conservation, and b) to the evolutionary roots of different aspects of human evolution (e.g. origin of food/plant selection, origin of culture, origin of skilled cognition, origin of future planning, origin of traditional medicin, origin of language and hand preference, origin of diseases).
Terrains de recherche
https://dzanga-sangha.org/?lang=fr
Publications
- octobre 2023 — Feeling a bit peckish: Seasonal and opportunistic insectivory for wild gorillas. American Journal of Biological Anthropology vol. 182, n° 2, dir. {Wiley} p. 210-223,
- décembre 2022 — Group differences in feeding and diet composition of wild western gorillas. Scientific Reports vol. 12, n° 1, dir. {Nature Publishing Group} p. 9569,
- décembre 2022 — Free hand hitting of stone-like objects in wild gorillas. Scientific Reports vol. 12, n° 1, dir. {Nature Publishing Group} p. 11981,
- octobre 2022 — Le régime alimentaire des Gorilles de plaine de l’Est, Gorilla beringei graueri et la pharmacopée humaine : Alimentation ou automédication ?. Revue de Primatologie , n° 13, dir. {Société francophone de primatologie (SFDP)},
- mars 2022 — The complex Y-chromosomal history of gorillas. American Journal of Primatology vol. 84, n° 3, dir. {Wiley},
- septembre 2021 — Foraging efficiency in temporally predictable environments: is a long-term temporal memory really advantageous?. Royal Society Open Science vol. 8, n° 9, dir. {The Royal Society} p. 210809,
- juin 2021 — No evidence for female kin association, indications for extragroup paternity, and sex-biased dispersal patterns in wild western gorillas. Ecology and Evolution vol. 11, n° 12, dir. {Wiley Open Access} p. 7634-7646 Type: Journal Article,ISSN2045-7758
- juin 2021 — Absence of specific individuals and high food abundance elicit food calls in wild western gorillas. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology vol. 75, n° 6, dir. {Springer Verlag} p. 98,
- mars 2021 — Mind the food: rapid changes in antioxidant content of diet affect oxidative status of chimpanzees. AJP - Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology vol. 320, n° 5, dir. {American Physiological Society} R728-R734,
- 2021 — « Les réalités du tourisme de vision des gorilles de plaines de l’Ouest. » in Aires protégées d’Afrique centrale – État 2020... , ,,