A brief guide to the different sorts of primate
Also: an animal that doesn’t throw its young.
Some stuff which paying subscribers got months ago. First off, something which went out in September: my helpful and informative guide to the various different types of primate.
1. An order of mammals which have large brains relative to their bodies, powerful eyes but a relatively weak sense of smell, and, generally speaking, thumbs – a series of characteristics originally developed to adapt to tree top life.
You are – forgive me for saying so – almost certainly a primate yourself. (Caveat left in because one doesn’t like to presume.) You are almost certainly likely to be rather smaller than the eastern gorilla, a critically endangered great ape native to the slopes of Uganda, Rwanda and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the male of which is, at up to 205kg, the largest known primate (and any larger would, one imagines, have made their presence felt). But you can take some comfort from the fact you are probably rather bigger than the adorable, and indeed adorably named, Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur, another critically-endangered species under 10cm long and weighing just 30g. Other primates, should you want any, include baboons, monkeys, lemurs and so forth.
There are several hundred species of primates – estimates range from 376, to 524, which is let’s be honest quite the range – and new ones are still being discovered, several this decade alone. The word, incidentally, is taken from the Latin “primus” via the Old French “primat”, and was chosen by the father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linneaus, to mean “the highest order of animals”.
Which is fair enough, if a little self-aggrandising. (What can you expect from a bloke who, despite being from Stockholm, went around calling himself both Carolus Linnæus and Carl von Linné.) The only slight problem with this decision is that it means we now associate the word mainly with monkeys, which makes it odd that, in a much older use of the term, it also refers to…
2. ...archbishops in certain Christian churches, as a way of highlighting that they’re the most important ones. So, the Archbishop of Canterbury is also the Primate of All England; there are Catholic, Anglican and Ukrainian Orthodox Primates of Canada; there are 36 other Anglican Primates who since 1979 have periodically held Primates Meetings; and so on. There is absolutely nothing remotely funny about any of this.
3. A rare type of princely title held by certain central European leaders who held both temporal and religious powers. Karl Theodor von Dalberg (1744-1817), for example, was both Archbishop of Mainz and the Archchancellor, the highest ranking prince of the Holy Roman Empire: he was thus sometimes referred to by the title Fürstprimas, or “Prince Primate”. In a similar way, Hungary’s Archbishop of Esztergom doubled as temporal prince, so he was a Prince-Primate too.
All this is a side effect of the weird structure of central European politics for much of this era – other territories were ruled by Prince-bishops, Prince-abbots and so on – and it is not really that different from (2) above. On the other hand though, tell me you aren’t enjoying the mental image conjured up by the term “Prince Primate”.
4. Powerful Christian worthies in the Ottoman Balkans in the centuries up to 1900, otherwise known as kodjabashis, were also known as primates: the word has the same sort of derivation as the bishop-y version above, and comes from a literal translation of the Greek proestoi or prokritoi (προεστοί/πρόκριτοι).
5. A “primate city” is a city that is the largest in its country to a disproportionate degree: Tokyo, Jakarta, London, Paris, are primates, all. The explanation and effects alike for this phenomenon are all very interesting, but I wrote about all that in April – that may have been what made me first start thinking about investigating primates more broadly – so if you want to refresh your memory I suggest you click here.
6. An amusingly named hamlet in the western Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Until 2016 it was classed as a village; then it became a special service area under the Rural Municipality of Eye Hill No. 382, which is in turn within Census Division No. 13 and SARM Division No. 6, a description that serves mainly to highlight the difficult of dividing up a land as big and empty as Canada for local government purposes. As of 2021, only 35 people lived there – a horrifying collapse from the 52 just five years earlier – suggesting that it is not in any way a boom town. Wikipedia has a single picture, of an abandoned grain elevator:
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The key things to remember here are that a) “primate” means “leading”, rather like the “prime” in “prime minister”, not just “monkey”; and b) it is not in any way funny that the same word can refer to both the Archbishop of Canterbury and a large ape. I thank you.
Animal of the Week: The Quokka
Something which went to paying subscribers in June.
No, not the dog. Yes, I’m still on a comfort kick. So sue me.
So, the quokka. It’s a marsupial, native to a frankly foolishly small section of the coast of Western Australia. It’s a macropod – a term which comes, adorably, from the Greek for “big foot” – closely related to other Aussie natives like kangaroos, wallabies, and wallaroos. It’s about the size of a domestic cat, and when Europeans first sighted one, in 1696, they mistook it for a massive rat. One of their habitats today is an island which the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh renamed ‘t Eylandt ‘t Rottenest: “rat nest island”. (The whole of Western Australia, readers of my book will be able to tell you, was once the colony of New Holland.)
The thing that made the quokka internet famous though is a meme: the idea that mothers deal with predators by chucking their young at them and running for it, like some kind of marsupial boomer.
This is not, in fact, true. But – here’s the punchline – it’s not entirely untrue either.
Quokkas, like all female marsupials, keep their young in pouches. When they feel threatened and flee, the babies sometimes fall out. Accidents happen.
The thing is, though, marsupials are generally pretty good at keeping babies en-pouched while moving about – it would be a fairly big design flaw if they weren't – so some researchers think it’s a deliberate survival strategy, to relax the pouch muscles deliberately. A dropped baby, after all, not only makes it possible for the mother to flee faster – it might effectively distract the predator.
There is an evolutionary logic to this. Quokkas can give birth twice a year, and produce an average of 17 joeys in a lifetime. I’m not sure what the survival rate of these kids is – but given there aren’t that many quokkas out there, and the population isn’t growing exponentially, I think we can assume it’s Not Great. Sacrificing a potentially infertile baby may, in genetic terms, be a pretty good deal.
So, no: quokkas do not literally throw their babies at predators to distract them. But this might not be enough to get them off the hook at the world’s worst mother awards all the same.
Please make your own topical jokes about the older generation’s approach to the housing market.