Why study monkeys anyway?
An approximation of chit-chat between me and strangers:
Stranger: What do you do?
Me: I'm a graduate student.
Stranger: Cool, cool. What are you studying?
Me: I study wild monkeys... white-faced capuchins. You know, that monkey you see on TV and in movies?
(I always say this with a bit of pride. This is exactly what I wanted to do when I was a kid, after all.)
Stranger: ... Why?
This is a typical response... Usually, it's not asked unkindly; just out of genuine bewilderment (although sometimes it is asked unkindly).
So I wanted to take a bit to explain exactly what I study and why I think it's important.
Heads up: I am going to talk a little about evolution and how it fits into my own work. I know many people back home in Missouri don't put any stock in the theory, but I hope you'll give my post a chance anyway. I'm not here to convince you that evolution is a real phenomenon (maybe I'll try that some other time), I just want to explain where I'm coming from and why I love what I do.
I'll start by explaining how I got interested in primatology in the first place. I've always loved learning about animals and the places they live. To the point that, in elementary school, I would pick random animals (anything from scorpions to bears) and start Googling. I had a little notepad where I would write down an animal's common name, Latin name, where it lived in the world, what its habitat is like, what it eats, and so on... This is what I did for fun.
But no matter how many animals I read about, there was always a special place in my heart for primates; I was that kid who would correct you if you called a chimpanzee a monkey. There was just something about them that drew me in. I thought they were amazing and smart and beautiful.
When I was in middle school, I decided that I wanted to be a doctor. I needed to start thinking about what I really wanted to be when I grew up, right? I was good at my science classes, I really loved biology, and doing a job that helps people is always a good thing. So I left animals behind and set my sights on med school: specifically Washington University in St. Louis. It was close to home and my dad had been telling me for years about how it's a great school (especially for pre-med students). I worked towards this goal until the fall of my senior year of high school when I finally submitted an early-decision application to Wash U.
I think just about everyone who knows me knows that I got in and that I loved (and still love) that school. Wash U helped me find my passion... even though it taught me the hard way that it is not medicine. That whole saga is quite the detour, so the short version is: I hated my pre-med classes, the more I learned about the day-to-day life of a doctor, the more I realized that it is not the life I want, and I started taking a bunch of different classes in other departments, like linguistics and anthropology, that sounded way more interesting to me.
And then: The One. The class that changed everything for me. In my junior year, I took an Introduction to Human Evolution course taught by a primatologist.
Here are the main things I learned in that class:
1. Evolution is not what I thought it was... Which confirmed my suspicions that evolution is far more comprehensive and complex than biology at a public high school in the Bible Belt taught me. (For example, chimpanzees are just as evolved as we are, we did not evolve from chimpanzees, and no scientist would tell you that we are.)
2. Studying primates can be a job, and people do it.
And so it began.
I started applying for research assistantships to help collect data on different primates. First, I helped out with behavioral research on gorillas in the St. Louis Zoo (loved it). Then, I went to the field for the first time through an amazing organization called Field Projects International to help collect communication data on emperor and saddleback tamarins in the Peruvian Amazon (loved it more).
***As a quick asside, it's difficult to describe how amazing field work is. Yes, it can be hot and damp and buggy and moldy and the showers might be cold and the food not great and you always stink and so on... But it's truly, indescribably wonderful and awe-inspiring to be in pristine nature... to get a glimpse of the world as it was before humans wrecked it and cut down the trees and drained the ponds and redirected the rivers and killed the animals that used to belong there. I feel whole and connected to the actual earth we live on when I'm in a beautiful forest.***
Anyway, this research assistanship allowed me to realize my passion for studying wild primates in their natural habitats, and it hooked me up with my next job in Costa Rica at Sector Santa Rosa National Park studying feeding and foraging behavior in white-faced capuchin monkeys. I was lucky enough to transition from doing this as a temporary research position to doing this for a masters degree in the University of Calgary's Department of Anthropology & Archaeology.
That's my origin story as a budding primatologist, more or less.
It answers the easier Why: the "why would I want to do this" part. Why Part II, "why does it matter," will come after this, the "what do I even do" part. On to the science! My masters project is centered around finding out if there are different foraging niches in a social group of capuchins for different ages and sexes. In other words, I wanted to see if adult males, adult females, juvenile males, juvenile females, and so forth:
-eat different diets (by choice or by necessity... some nuts might be too hard for a smaller monkey to eat, for example)
-process foods differently (such as how many times they bite it or sniff it) and
-use their habitats differently (like, maybe adult males spend the most time on the ground vs. higher up in trees and whether different sizes of branches are used to move around the canopy)
I gathered data to answer these questions by first learning to tell apart the ~100 capuchins in four different social groups in Santa Rosa. We do not trap, mark, or track our monkeys, so researchers at my field site tell them apart uninvasively by learning their physical features, like their faces and body shapes. Every monkey has a name (and personality) and each group has a theme for the names. We have four groups, and--in case you are curious--the themes are Disney, spices/flavors/condiments, Harry Potter, and Star Wars.
I, along with my project assistant and the full time field assistants in the park, would find the monkeys by walking trails that have been previously cut through the forest. Once monkeys were found, we would follow them from dawn (when they wake up) until dusk (when they go to sleep) for 2-3 days in a row.
During these 2-3 days, every half hour I performed what we call "group scans," where I recorded where the group was, what they were doing as a whole, and the behaviors of every individual monkey. Here's an example of the kind of data we would record during scans: the group is visually foraging (generally looking for food, usually bugs, while moving through the trees), 20 meters north of tayra trail, group members are pretty close to one another, it's sunny, the group is in the shade, and height-wise, they are in the middle of the trees. And then individuals: Simba is visually foraging, on a small horizontal branch, in the middle canopy, in the shade, in the central part of the group. Cogsworth is resting, on a medium horizontal branch, in the lower canopy, in the shade, in the intermediate (rather than the central) part of the group. Ed is visually foraging, on a small vertical branch, in the upper canopy, in the sun, on the periphery of the group. This information was recorded for as many monkeys as I can see and identify in 7 minutes, which gives us enough snapshots to see how much of their time each monkey spends in different parts of their habitat and doing different behaviors.
I also collected more detailed behavioral data in what's called "focal animal follows." In each social group, I had 11-14 specific individuals that I would follow for 10 minutes at a time when they were actively looking for food or eating. During these focal animal follows, I record everything the monkey does: how high up they are, what size of branch they are on and every time that changes, every touch, sniff, or bite of fruit, every time they scan their surroundings, every time they look for bugs behind a piece of bark, and much more. The data from these focal animal follows, unlike the data from group scans, will let me look at how much time they spend at different heights in the canopy and on what sized branches, how long it takes a monkey to eat a single food item, how many food items it eats in a short period of time, and what actions they use to find and hande food items.
Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to analyze the data I collected from January-July of this year. But if you're interested, I can get back to you with some results in the next several months.
Now we're ready to get to the "why does it matter." Ok. Here goes.
While many animals (including humans, most non-human primates, wolves, elephants, and flamingos, just to name a few) live in social groups with multiple members, this is pretty uncommon when you consider all animals. Most are solitary, only getting together to mate and, sometimes, raise offspring. This is because living in a group means you have to compete against your group members (who might be family) for food and mates, diseases and parasites can spread more quickly and easily, and--if you're not at the top of the food chain--you might draw the attention of predators.
So why would any animal live in a group? Despite these drawbacks, there are plenty of benefits. Even though you have to compete with your group members for food, you can protect food from other animals and smaller groups. Even though males have to compete with other males in their group for mates, at least they know where to find females and have a decent chance of mating with them. A group might have a harder time avoiding the detection of predators, but there's also safety in numbers: groups have an easier time spotting predators, fending them off, and, when all else fails, having more members means you're less likely to the be unlucky one who gets nabbed (if you're a group of 2, your chances of being caught are 50%, but in a group of 20, your chances go down to 5%).
...but what does this have to do with my study? As you just read, there are plenty of pros and cons to group-living, so it would be in the best interest for group-living animals to try and reduce the effects of the cons and maximize the pros. One possible way to do this is by reducing feeding competition with your group members by eating different things and in different places in your group's territory. If capuchins and other primates use this strategy (which is what I'm trying to find out), it could shed light on how group-living could have evolved in so many primates. If this does not turn out to be a strategy employed, then we know it's time to get back to the drawing board! Either way, I'm hoping my research can help expand our understanding of how group-living can be practically supported in social animals.
Furthermore, by conducting my research on capuchin monkeys, there's the added benefit of studying group-living in a species that belongs to the same taxonomic order as us. Humans are so social that anthropologists put us on a whole new level and often refer to us as "ultrasocial." I mean... it's pretty crazy when you think about it: We live in groups of hundreds of thousands (even millions in big cities!) of people that we're not only unrelated to... we don't even know many or most of the people around us. Yet, for the most part, we live next to each other peacefully without much fighting or violence. Not only that, we live cooperatively. Think about how many times you've held the door open for strangers and strangers have held the door open for you. When kind, altruistic behaviors are observed in any other species, it basically makes headlines, but for humans, it's a completely mundane fact of life. My research on age/sex class foraging niches within capuchin social groups ties into a larger question in anthropology about how humans were able to evolve beyond the sociality we typically see in nature to achieve ultrasociality.
Stranger: What do you do?
Me: I'm a graduate student.
Stranger: Cool, cool. What are you studying?
Me: I study wild monkeys... white-faced capuchins. You know, that monkey you see on TV and in movies?
(I always say this with a bit of pride. This is exactly what I wanted to do when I was a kid, after all.)
Stranger: ... Why?
This is a typical response... Usually, it's not asked unkindly; just out of genuine bewilderment (although sometimes it is asked unkindly).
So I wanted to take a bit to explain exactly what I study and why I think it's important.
 |
| This is Winky: a prime example of a white-faced capuchin monkey! |
 |
| For the record, I'm vehemently opposed to using primates in TV and movies. This poor little monkey makes stress noises the entire time she is on screen. But my rant against having exotic animals as pets and in film is for another day. |
I'll start by explaining how I got interested in primatology in the first place. I've always loved learning about animals and the places they live. To the point that, in elementary school, I would pick random animals (anything from scorpions to bears) and start Googling. I had a little notepad where I would write down an animal's common name, Latin name, where it lived in the world, what its habitat is like, what it eats, and so on... This is what I did for fun.
But no matter how many animals I read about, there was always a special place in my heart for primates; I was that kid who would correct you if you called a chimpanzee a monkey. There was just something about them that drew me in. I thought they were amazing and smart and beautiful.
When I was in middle school, I decided that I wanted to be a doctor. I needed to start thinking about what I really wanted to be when I grew up, right? I was good at my science classes, I really loved biology, and doing a job that helps people is always a good thing. So I left animals behind and set my sights on med school: specifically Washington University in St. Louis. It was close to home and my dad had been telling me for years about how it's a great school (especially for pre-med students). I worked towards this goal until the fall of my senior year of high school when I finally submitted an early-decision application to Wash U.
I think just about everyone who knows me knows that I got in and that I loved (and still love) that school. Wash U helped me find my passion... even though it taught me the hard way that it is not medicine. That whole saga is quite the detour, so the short version is: I hated my pre-med classes, the more I learned about the day-to-day life of a doctor, the more I realized that it is not the life I want, and I started taking a bunch of different classes in other departments, like linguistics and anthropology, that sounded way more interesting to me.
And then: The One. The class that changed everything for me. In my junior year, I took an Introduction to Human Evolution course taught by a primatologist.
Here are the main things I learned in that class:
1. Evolution is not what I thought it was... Which confirmed my suspicions that evolution is far more comprehensive and complex than biology at a public high school in the Bible Belt taught me. (For example, chimpanzees are just as evolved as we are, we did not evolve from chimpanzees, and no scientist would tell you that we are.)
2. Studying primates can be a job, and people do it.
 |
| Yeah... not quite. This famous illustration is pretty misleading. |
And so it began.
I started applying for research assistantships to help collect data on different primates. First, I helped out with behavioral research on gorillas in the St. Louis Zoo (loved it). Then, I went to the field for the first time through an amazing organization called Field Projects International to help collect communication data on emperor and saddleback tamarins in the Peruvian Amazon (loved it more).
 |
| Western lowland gorilla Emperor tamarin Saddleback tamarin |
***As a quick asside, it's difficult to describe how amazing field work is. Yes, it can be hot and damp and buggy and moldy and the showers might be cold and the food not great and you always stink and so on... But it's truly, indescribably wonderful and awe-inspiring to be in pristine nature... to get a glimpse of the world as it was before humans wrecked it and cut down the trees and drained the ponds and redirected the rivers and killed the animals that used to belong there. I feel whole and connected to the actual earth we live on when I'm in a beautiful forest.***
 |
| Seeing a sunset like this every day for five weeks while in Peru changed me, man. |
 |
| iPhones just can't do Santa Rosa justice. I hope everyone gets a chance to experience places like this in their lives. |
Anyway, this research assistanship allowed me to realize my passion for studying wild primates in their natural habitats, and it hooked me up with my next job in Costa Rica at Sector Santa Rosa National Park studying feeding and foraging behavior in white-faced capuchin monkeys. I was lucky enough to transition from doing this as a temporary research position to doing this for a masters degree in the University of Calgary's Department of Anthropology & Archaeology.
 |
| Just for fun, here's a geographical map of my primatology journey. |
That's my origin story as a budding primatologist, more or less.
It answers the easier Why: the "why would I want to do this" part. Why Part II, "why does it matter," will come after this, the "what do I even do" part. On to the science! My masters project is centered around finding out if there are different foraging niches in a social group of capuchins for different ages and sexes. In other words, I wanted to see if adult males, adult females, juvenile males, juvenile females, and so forth:
-eat different diets (by choice or by necessity... some nuts might be too hard for a smaller monkey to eat, for example)
-process foods differently (such as how many times they bite it or sniff it) and
-use their habitats differently (like, maybe adult males spend the most time on the ground vs. higher up in trees and whether different sizes of branches are used to move around the canopy)
I gathered data to answer these questions by first learning to tell apart the ~100 capuchins in four different social groups in Santa Rosa. We do not trap, mark, or track our monkeys, so researchers at my field site tell them apart uninvasively by learning their physical features, like their faces and body shapes. Every monkey has a name (and personality) and each group has a theme for the names. We have four groups, and--in case you are curious--the themes are Disney, spices/flavors/condiments, Harry Potter, and Star Wars.
 |
| This is one of my study subjects: Chai. He's a 9-year-old, subadult male. He's grumpy and likes to act tough, but he loved playing with the babies born into his group this year. (Photo creds to Devin. I'm so glad he got a chance to see these monkeys.) |
I, along with my project assistant and the full time field assistants in the park, would find the monkeys by walking trails that have been previously cut through the forest. Once monkeys were found, we would follow them from dawn (when they wake up) until dusk (when they go to sleep) for 2-3 days in a row.
During these 2-3 days, every half hour I performed what we call "group scans," where I recorded where the group was, what they were doing as a whole, and the behaviors of every individual monkey. Here's an example of the kind of data we would record during scans: the group is visually foraging (generally looking for food, usually bugs, while moving through the trees), 20 meters north of tayra trail, group members are pretty close to one another, it's sunny, the group is in the shade, and height-wise, they are in the middle of the trees. And then individuals: Simba is visually foraging, on a small horizontal branch, in the middle canopy, in the shade, in the central part of the group. Cogsworth is resting, on a medium horizontal branch, in the lower canopy, in the shade, in the intermediate (rather than the central) part of the group. Ed is visually foraging, on a small vertical branch, in the upper canopy, in the sun, on the periphery of the group. This information was recorded for as many monkeys as I can see and identify in 7 minutes, which gives us enough snapshots to see how much of their time each monkey spends in different parts of their habitat and doing different behaviors.
I also collected more detailed behavioral data in what's called "focal animal follows." In each social group, I had 11-14 specific individuals that I would follow for 10 minutes at a time when they were actively looking for food or eating. During these focal animal follows, I record everything the monkey does: how high up they are, what size of branch they are on and every time that changes, every touch, sniff, or bite of fruit, every time they scan their surroundings, every time they look for bugs behind a piece of bark, and much more. The data from these focal animal follows, unlike the data from group scans, will let me look at how much time they spend at different heights in the canopy and on what sized branches, how long it takes a monkey to eat a single food item, how many food items it eats in a short period of time, and what actions they use to find and hande food items.
Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to analyze the data I collected from January-July of this year. But if you're interested, I can get back to you with some results in the next several months.
Now we're ready to get to the "why does it matter." Ok. Here goes.
While many animals (including humans, most non-human primates, wolves, elephants, and flamingos, just to name a few) live in social groups with multiple members, this is pretty uncommon when you consider all animals. Most are solitary, only getting together to mate and, sometimes, raise offspring. This is because living in a group means you have to compete against your group members (who might be family) for food and mates, diseases and parasites can spread more quickly and easily, and--if you're not at the top of the food chain--you might draw the attention of predators.
So why would any animal live in a group? Despite these drawbacks, there are plenty of benefits. Even though you have to compete with your group members for food, you can protect food from other animals and smaller groups. Even though males have to compete with other males in their group for mates, at least they know where to find females and have a decent chance of mating with them. A group might have a harder time avoiding the detection of predators, but there's also safety in numbers: groups have an easier time spotting predators, fending them off, and, when all else fails, having more members means you're less likely to the be unlucky one who gets nabbed (if you're a group of 2, your chances of being caught are 50%, but in a group of 20, your chances go down to 5%).
...but what does this have to do with my study? As you just read, there are plenty of pros and cons to group-living, so it would be in the best interest for group-living animals to try and reduce the effects of the cons and maximize the pros. One possible way to do this is by reducing feeding competition with your group members by eating different things and in different places in your group's territory. If capuchins and other primates use this strategy (which is what I'm trying to find out), it could shed light on how group-living could have evolved in so many primates. If this does not turn out to be a strategy employed, then we know it's time to get back to the drawing board! Either way, I'm hoping my research can help expand our understanding of how group-living can be practically supported in social animals.
Furthermore, by conducting my research on capuchin monkeys, there's the added benefit of studying group-living in a species that belongs to the same taxonomic order as us. Humans are so social that anthropologists put us on a whole new level and often refer to us as "ultrasocial." I mean... it's pretty crazy when you think about it: We live in groups of hundreds of thousands (even millions in big cities!) of people that we're not only unrelated to... we don't even know many or most of the people around us. Yet, for the most part, we live next to each other peacefully without much fighting or violence. Not only that, we live cooperatively. Think about how many times you've held the door open for strangers and strangers have held the door open for you. When kind, altruistic behaviors are observed in any other species, it basically makes headlines, but for humans, it's a completely mundane fact of life. My research on age/sex class foraging niches within capuchin social groups ties into a larger question in anthropology about how humans were able to evolve beyond the sociality we typically see in nature to achieve ultrasociality.
 |
| Hey, thanks for reading! This is your prize: a picture of my favorite monkey, Hagrid, when he was a wee babe. |
Comments
Post a Comment