New chapter

Sorry again for lateness! I'd give an excuse, but then, when was the last time you wrote to me giving me an update of your goings on complete with photos? Huh? Didn't think so.

Anyway, last month Brendan, Maxine and I completed our four-month field season with Flakes group, the monkeys you have been seeing up until now. We finished all the experiments I described last post, and Brendan flew home. We had been so efficient, in fact, that Brendan left a month earlier than he had originally planned, and I have been doing standard assistant stuff ever since. It was definitely the efficiency thing that made him leave, by the way. He assured me in no mild terms that my body odor hardly played any role in his decision. So I have that going for me. Also these photos:

 

I'm not entirely sure why these photos make me so happy, but honestly, if you can look at these without so much as a twitch of the lip, you may wish to consult a physician.

Aaaaaanyway it was very emotional, I made a heartfelt photo montage of Napoleon's greatest moments...

... we had a goodbye party (the other PhD group also left, leaving only the core team here), and got a little tipsy...

No, dude... I love you man, you should just stay... forever...

                         

...and a lot sad...

 FOREVER I TELL YOU
 (uncontrollable sobbing)

My team went out for one last hurrah with Flakes group (I will be seeing them again, but I have mainly been working with different groups this month) and I finally got a couple of photos of myself with them (I've been hearing a lot of muttering that I'm making the whole thing up, so...)

I'm the one on the bottom

Anyway, life is rather different now. There are fewer of us here, and I have had to learn a whole new bunch of monkey IDs. I'm also trying to finish editing my data for Brendan, and figuring out my future (I've been accepted to a couple of PhD programs in the US, including to UCLA where I would return to work with these monkeys, but I haven't made any kind of decision yet), and mentally gearing up for my family to come visit at the end of the month. It's been hard work and I again apologise for not posting recently.

However, that is about to change (again) (hopefully). I have decided that instead of trying to write long  themed posts explaining what has happened in my life since the last post (like this one), I will skip ahead and tell you everything that will happen right now. I have two more weeks of work here, after which my parents and siblings will turn up. I will introduce them to my monkey friends, and then we will see Costa Rica together. Then my travels here will be over. Some time soon I will make a decision about my future, and I will most definitely be going to Japan for a month and a half, but you probably won't hear about that on this blog (although again, that sneaky url does give me some wiggle room).

That being said, I still have a whole lot to post about. Lots of little things happened here that yielded some pretty cool photos, which I was unable to fit into the aforementioned longform posts. So I have decided to bring these mini-episodes to you in the form of what I shall be calling vignettes, because I am pretentious. I will pre-write these and upload them hopefully once a day. There should be material for at least 10 of these, so my plan is to have a week and a half of new content being posted every day. Tell your friends. (Don't actually tell your friends).

Tomorrow will be introducing you to some new monkeys, including Pitufo, who is missing a hand, Moth, who is missing a nose, and Hannukah, who is missing a soul. The day after you will be meeting Harvey Dent, the most badass howler monkey this side of Guatemala. Also expect some wildlife posts. And a newborn baby.

Much love,

Me.

PS The awkward grooming session photos are back!!!!

Just what on Earth do I think I'm doing?

     Another month, another holiday, and another brief window of opportunity to write things. I'm in Nicaragua at the moment because I can't stay in the country for more than three months at a time without a special visa, although it's completely fine so long as I hop across the border for a couple of days every three months because [logical reasons].

     I've actually spent less time than I would have liked Nicaragua-ing, and rather more time working on data entry, which requires me to listen to literally hours of my own recorded voice, multiple times. I'm even beginning to find myself quite annoying, if any of you fine people can imagine such a thing.

"Never!", I hear you cry

     Anyway I thought I would take opportunity to explain a bit more about this project and what I do here. It may be a bit more wordy than other posts, and probably quite boring to many of you, so feel free to skip it, although there will be some cool photos which you should definitely have a glance at.

Come, gather round, children. I have many stories to tell.

             I work at Lomas de Barbudal monkey project. If you follow that link you'll find out that the project was founded in 1990; and if you ever hear me complain about conditions here bear in mind that Susan Perry founded this place when there were no maps, no trails, and no GPS; when in order to follow the monkeys (who were unhabituated, mind, so very vigilant of humans and prone to staying high up in trees and running off very fast) you had to crash completely blind through the unfamiliar wilderness with nothing but guts and a machete to use as tools. Nowadays, if anything, the monkeys are a little too familiar around us as we regularly catch them in compromising situations.

"It's not what it looks like!!!"



(it was totally what it looks like. They are half brothers. For shame.)

     Anyway this place is the longest continuously-running primate field project in the history of ever, which is super important and cool when studying a species like capuchins. 

     White-faced capuchins, if you did not click on that link or wikipedia them already, are very brainy, very long-lived monkeys who have been known to occasionally appear on Friends in the '90s. Interesting fact: the monkey on Friends was actually a female, while her character was male, but I for one applaud this bold rejection of oppressive gender binaries.

     Capuchins have very complex social lives and also learn to forage hard to eat fruits by watching older individuals do so. The Lomas monkeys in particular are quite famous for demonstrating group specific learned behaviours: one of the most convincing examples of culture in a non-human species.

     Capuchins, like chimps and other species including non-primate ones, have been shown to display culturally transmitted foraging behaviour, but the Lomas monkeys are famous for something else that they do. Certain groups, including the one that I study, play these very specific and slightly odd-looking games with each other. These generally involve taking a finger, a stick, a leaf, or some other object and inserting it into another monkey's mouth and having them bite down on it while the first monkey tries to pull it out. Sometimes they also insert fingers into each other's nostril in what is known as cultural hand-sniffing.

Quijote (right), the alpha, plays finger-in-mouth with his daughter Brizzle

What is fascinating is that these games seem to be completely absent in most groups, where they simply have never caught on. In others, such as Flakes, the group I study, they play them all the time. Monkeys who have been taught to play go on to initiate the games with younger monkeys as they grow up. 

If I can get geeky on you for a moment, I just want to really hammer home how cool this is. These games seemingly serve no purpose, except for perhaps bonding, which is generally achieved through grooming; and yet these traditions are perpetuated organically within a group. 

We rightly think of culture and tradition as among the most important defining elements of humanity. They provide humans with our diversity, our shared meaning and sense of belonging; it lies at the root of language, art, and science. Each of us is so profoundly shaped by our culture that it's hard not to conclude that culture is what makes us human to begin with. And here are these little guys, with their strange traditions that must seem so alien to monkeys of different groups.

It really makes you think that maybe, if you got together enough of these capuchins, and put them in front of an infinite number of typewriters, one of them would eventually figure out that typewriters are obsolete and demand a MacBook Pro.

Anyway, as a reward for all that text here are a couple of the cutest monkeys being cute.

Mehitable, a.k.a *SQUEEE*

Guinevere, a little boy, looking wistfully at his
more masculine-named peers

      Ok, so, all this is well and fine, but you still don't know what I do over here. Well, first of all you should know I am not in the position of a standard assistant as advertised on the Lomas website.  These assistants come for a year and participate in the general effort of the project, keeping tabs on the various groups and documenting the changing group dynamics, collecting  data as is needed and with possibly a different emphasis depending on Susan Perry's current research interests and what her grants are based on. By the way, on the rather slim off-chance that this blog finds its way to someone who might actually be interested in doing something similar, these assistants are in short supply, so do think about applying if you want fieldwork experience. 

     Anyway I have been employed by a grad student, Brendan, who needs assistants for 5 months to help  him with his research on social learning. Social learning, that is, learning from other individuals rather than by trial and error on your own, is a really big field in animal behaviour. Big questions include whether animals can imitate each other, whether or not they actively teach each other, what cues they pick up on while learning from others, and which individuals they decide to learn from. It's this question in particular that we are really looking at.

So when you're trying to study how monkeys learn from one another, you need several things:

• An activity that requires learning; this can be something artificially created, like pulling on a certain number of levers and strings to get a prize, or it can be something natural, like foraging for something tricky
• Naive individuals, that is, individuals who do not know how to do the thing
• Experienced individuals, who do know how to do the thing

Now there are two ways to go about getting these prerequisites. You can work with monkeys in captivity. The advantage of this is that you get to control everything. You can make sure that only some individuals are taught the activity, and you can monitor every time that the experienced individuals are in contact with the naive ones when they are performing this activity. In this way you get to see all the interactions and get a full picture of what is going on. Many interesting studies have already been conducted like this with capuchins in captivity, and the data collected is definitely worthwhile.

BUT you're still only seeing what goes on in captivity. And as such you never really know how these "unnatural" conditions affect the animals' behaviour. Plenty of animals are observed to do things in captivity which they never do in the wild, so you never know if you are witnessing something that truly reflects the evolutionary pressures that your animals have undergone, or whether they are just reacting and adapting to artificial conditions.

The other possibility is that you look at how they behave in the wild. This has also been done, including at Lomas. There are certain difficult-to-forage fruit which have been studied extensively, with every foraging technique noted and how the younger monkeys behave around the more knowledgeable older ones when foraging occurs.

BUT of course here you have no control. You can't monitor every single time a monkey picks up one of the fruits, nor do you know from day one who is experienced and who isn't. You can only get a snapshot, never the full picture.

And this is where Brendan's work is so ingenious. The group we study, Flakes group, is an offshoot of a larger group that split off and migrated to a different, only slightly overlapping territory about 10 years ago. as luck would have it, their new territory is completely devoid of a type of tree which produces a difficult-to-forage fruit called the Panama fruit. These fruit have tasty seeds enclosed in a tough exterior which ca be accessed through a variety of techniques.

Anyway, as a result of this, the older monkeys of Flakes grew up with Panama and know how to forage it. The younger ones didn't and don't. Because of this unique situation we get the best of both worlds: we can introduce panama fruits to the monkeys in controlled bouts, monitoring every instance of the monkeys handling the fruits, while still studying wild capuchins doing something completely natural to them.

Panama fruits on a helpful stand

So this, mainly, is what I do here. We follow the monkeys around wearing ponchos (which they are used to seeing us wear in the rainy season) and when they're not looking, crouch down and place fruits on the ground. We then walk away and wait for them to see the fruits, then we record what they do. It's actually a lot more exciting than it sounds.

Is he.. ok, what's he gonna do? Huh? Oh my god anything could happen.
EYES PEELED PEOPLE.

LOOK!!! LOOK!!! HE'S BITING IT! BIIIIIITINGG IIIITTTT!

Ok, I feel like that was wordy enough. Thanks for making it through this far. I have loads of cool wildlife photos built up so I should have some photo-heavy posts up soon to make up for this, but yeah. Now you know what I do. For the record we are getting lots of great data and it's really a whole lot of fun, if a lot of work. We record what they do on a dictaphone, as I explained earlier, and that means a whole lot of listening to myself talk so I can enter data into an Excel spreadsheet.

My life is so difficult *sigh*

Anyway big love, I'm done.

P.S I'm out of uncomfortable grooming sessions so here's someone getting groomed like a boss, and loving it.

Filler episode 2: Moving Photographs

Sorry about this, I know I said I would write a real post soon; I have a holiday coming up soon so hopefully I'll be able to write something actually informative instead of relying on monkey pictures.

Or I might laze around doing nothing, I haven't decided

 Hopefully this stuff is exciting enough that you'll forgive me.

First up, Napoleon (who you may remember as the derpy monkey) caught and killed a squirrel the other day. It's worth mentioning that Napoleon was born in 1991, like me. This monkey is my age. That's crazy to me. How is it that so many people my age have already accomplished so much? First Jennifer Lawrence wins an Oscar and now this? I'll probably never even catch and eat a squirrel in my lifetime, but here he is:

I also enjoy THE SOULS OF THE UNBORN

Anyway that was fun. Here it is in "moving".

While we're on the subject of moving pictures, here is a video of some of the juveniles playing during siesta time.

I hope that makes up for the headless squirrel (note to self - idea for horror movie screenplay - like Sleepy Hollow meets Winnie the Pooh). 

Anyway these videos took ages to upload so I will have to love you and leave you, hope to get a post with substance up some time next week.

PS If you're wondering, the cast of the play bout video is as follows:

The two monkeys playing at the beginning are 4-year-old boys called R Kelly and Young Jeezy. They are briefly interrupted by Mehitable, the 6-month-old baby boy of the group (who you have seen previously in photos because, well, tiny baby monkey). Finally the smaller one who comes in after R Kelly has grown sleepy is a two-year-old girl called Larry David (seriously. we also have a girl named Darth Vader, one called Bruce Willis, and a boy called Guinevere). Larry and Young Jeezy are the two playing at the end of the video.

Sneaky Climby Bastards

                  So hey, I know I said I would explain about the project and the work we do here, but I might save that for some other time because it might be long. And I don't have much time, but I figure I should post more often. So this might be a filler episode. Also I said I would do a post on the wildlife I've seen but I figure I might stretch that material to cover several posts, because otherwise I will definitely run out of things to say. It turns out I'm not actually all that interesting a person, which is why I have to trick you into thinking I am with adorable monkey photos.

Is it working?

So we just came back from our holiday, which I boringly spent at home, because we each have to spend one holiday (we get five days at the end of each month) guarding the house. This is why I was able to get my shit together to write a post.

Now returning from vacation it becomes abundantly clear why we have to wake up before the monkeys and stay with them until they get their tiny black and white arses to sleep. When you go looking for them and you don't know where they are, you don't find them. For a long time. It turns out capuchins are sneaky, climby bastards. These are the same monkeys that jump about and scream and break branches like the world's about to end whenever you are with them, but as soon as you leave them to their own devices for a few days, all of a sudden you cannot hear them at all. Not a peep. 

 By the way, that previous line was a joke premised on the fact that "peep" is the technical term for a very common capuchin vocalisation.

Anybody? Anybody?

#monkeyhumour #trustmethisstuffisfunny #thiskilledinthefield
#isthishowhashtagswork #idontknow #betteraskthemonkeys #theyusetwitterallthetime
#hahaclassic #yousee,twittersareanothercommoncapuchinvocalisation
#brilliant

But the upside is that when you're searching for them you have time to stop and take a look at some of the other wildlife, like the howler monkeys.

Here's one we found in a pretty pink tree

Unfortunately if you look a bit closer, it becomes apparent that this particular monkey has been traumatised from a young age and is suffering from severe PTSD.

   

I have seen... things...

Anyway as adorable as these guys are the reason we don't study them is because they spend their entire days just hanging around, eating leaves and howling. They're kinda boring actually.

Oh... I'm sorry... I thought we were having fun, never mind.

Apologies, Fictional Anthropomorphised Howler Monkey, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. You guys do have one thing going for you.

Your gigantic white balls

Anyway, right now there are a bunch of you (probably) saying: "But Ed! You said you were going to show us wildlife, and all you have is more monkeys? There's more than life to monkeys, you know." And right now the same bunch of you is probably receiving a lot of confused looks from the people in the room with you, because that's an odd thing to say to a computer screen. Hopefully they will assume you are on Skype and move on. Try not to blush too hard or you will give the game away.

Anyway never fear, I do have photos of non-monkeys. Here is a pretty kingfisher.

And here is a scary rattlesnake.

And you will get more in due course. In the meantime I thought I would continue the long-running tradition that I began last post of ending my posts with photos of infants looking uncomfortable while being groomed by mothers and aunts.

I am, like, the worst blogger

SO yeah, I guess I shouldn't have started this thing if I'm only going to be updating every two months, especially since I'm only here for five (although did anyone notice the suspiciously flexible URL, hinting that possibly, maybe I'm leaving open the option of writing about something other than Costa Rica? I'm so crafty).

But I guess there's nothing sadder than a blog with two entries (a blog with one, you say? shut up you smartarses), and I have actually heard that people are confused as to why I'm not posting, so I guess I'll update you.

But first, here is the greatest road sign of all time

   So the main reason I haven't been able to update is that I've been really busy. Two out of every three days are spent in the field here. Field days consist of getting up at 3:45 on average, depending on how far the monkeys went to sleep the night before. We follow them around all day collecting data and generally get back a bit before 7PM.  We shower, eat dinner, and basically pass out. I found out the hard way it's frowned upon to blog at the table, let alone in the field.

The monkeys disapprove.

On our off days we take it in turns to do a variety of chores, including cook for everyone. In addition to this you have to go over the data you've collected, edit it, upload it, fill in the numerous spreadsheets that document things like whose poop you collected for hormone processing, and do any of the tests you have to sit as a trainee. By the time all this is done, you're basically done for the day.

It's a rock-and-roll lifestyle

But it isn't all fun and games. Working here took a while to get used to. Mosquitos and chiggers are constants in my life, and itchy is just something that I am now, a part of my identity rather than a passing irritating condition. 

Other bitey/stingy things are more painful, if thankfully less common. Scorpions and poisonous caterpillars hang around the digs, but are relatively easy to avoid, certainly compared to the wasps that you can sometimes run into in the jungle that attack you from nowhere and make you rethink your life choices for a few minutes. But the worst in my opinion, the creme de la horrible, the crowning jewel of the cruelty of nature, are the acacia ants.

(David Attenborough voice here) These little things are miracles of evolution, having adapted into a symbiotic relationship with the plants whose name they share. The trees provide them with food and shelter, and the ants vigorously defend the tree against any potential threats. I wish that they would all die.

Basically they spend their time scuttling around these trees, which are EVERYWHERE. If you so much as brush up against one of these trees, which you do, several times a day, some will shake off onto you. At which point it is no longer a question of whether, but when, how many times, and where on your body you will be bitten. And the bites hurt. If you get a bunch on the same spot you will swell up unpleasantly for several days. I once got bitten 5 times on the same nipple and developed a painful breast that stuck around for a week. Seriously, I could write a book about how much I hate acacia ants.

I'll call it Memoirs of Acacia

 Of course, there are all sorts of wonderful things here as well. A number of you have asked about the people I work with. Since this is technically the internet I don't want to go into too much detail about these people and risk divulging something they wouldn't want me to, so suffice it to say that we all get on really well. There are around 10 of us, of which 3 working on the project with me. Everyone here is either Canadian or American, so they can get confused by my accent sometimes, poor dears.
Also there's a lot of wonderful stuff to see here apart from the capuchins. I want to only post photos I've taken here, so I'll keep the wildlife post for another time when I have better photos, but the only word to describe it all is faun-tastic.

Anybody? Anybody?

ok thats enough. I'll tell you more about the data collection we do next time. Here are some cute photos of a little girl who's a teensy bit uncomfortable with how intense this grooming session is getting.