By Megan Joyce, PhD student at Concordia University

Monkeys are smart. I knew this. I have known this for quite some time. I used to work with language competent apes who could request things their neighbouring group members had received earlier. Well of course, it’s only logical you would like grapes too!

Monkeys are also mischievous. And curious. Who hasn’t seen a video of a monkey stealing something out of an unsuspecting tourist’s purse? Or better yet, perhaps they stole the purse itself! 

As a PhD student and primatologist in training, I am fortunate I get to observe monkeys and learn about their behaviour. To do this I spend time in places where monkeys are naturally found. The primates I currently study are a large, 400+ group of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata). They are wild and free-range in the mountainous forests on Awaji Island, which is located in the Seto Sea of Japan. Here, I am able to visit and observe the group.

Field work requires a lot of planning, as we don’t get to go as often as we would like, nor are we able to stay as long as we would like. Since we have relatively small windows to observe the Japanese macaques, we go in with plans! Really specific and intentional plans. 

I carefully plan my studies and methods in advance. This includes discussions with my advisors and both our Canadian and Japanese collaborators. We try to predict potential issues and troubleshoot solutions in advance, all before we even arrive in the field. For this latest field season, I only had about 5 weeks on Awaji Island to gather as much data as I could. 

I’ll admit, I love fieldwork. Or, mostly I love fieldwork. Being in the field is a whole different world. 

Summers in Japan are hot. Ruthlessly hot. Especially in July and August when we are typically there. Luckily there are excellent shade-providing trees and often ocean breezes that provide a little welcome relief. There are also cooling towels and mini fans that seem like an unnecessary luxury, but are in fact a great investment for those sunny, 45-degree weather days. 

I wholeheartedly love observing the monkeys though. I love their vivid (and sometimes soap-opera-esque) social lives. I love seeing who spends time together and how they are mothering their infants. I love how awkward the infants run and play, and how accident-prone they are as they learn and grow.  

One of my favourite things is learning to recognize individual monkeys. It is a true skill, especially when there are 400+ monkeys in a group. Our Japanese collaborators know the monkeys so well that they are able to recognize them all by sight. They are also very generous in sharing their knowledge and they help me learn to identify my focal animals.

My PhD research is focused on primate behavioural flexibility. One of the chapters in my final dissertation will be on the variation in decision making in a multi-destination foraging array experiment. To do this, I set up six tables in a Z-shaped array and place food on them to observe how the monkeys move through the array space. I conducted the first phase during my master’s field research.

The biggest challenge to collecting my fieldwork this summer was being able to bait the array tables with food. Previously, there were few enough monkeys in my array field that I was able to bait the tables with food before the monkeys would run into the array to collect food. However, this summer there were far more monkeys socializing in the array field, trying to stay cool in the shaded tree-lines, especially in the hot afternoons. 

Unsurprisingly, I was unable to successfully collect any array trials the first week I was there. That’s right. Zero data was collected for my foraging array that first week. My advisor and I were coming up with ideas, workarounds really. We settled on trying automated pet feeders. 

Automated pet feeders are contraptions that can be programmed to auto-release food for pets at specific times. We settled on a model, we ordered six of them, and waited for them to arrive. When they did arrive, Mr. Nobuhara, one of the monkey center’s owners and inventor extraordinaire, helped us drill holes in the top so we could bungee them to the array tables. 

Success! Or so we thought…

I must reiterate, monkeys are smart. They did everything they could to break into those new array feeders. They flipped tables, tried reaching in to take the food, hit the feeders, pressed their buttons, jumped on and kicked the feeders! Luckily, once we acquired (and Mr. Nobuhara installed) 2.5-foot-long metal stakes through the array platforms and into the ground, those things were secure! 

The monkeys still tried to break into them occasionally, but once the routine of me baiting the feeders and the food being auto-released later was established, it became much easier to collect data. A fieldwork win for the books! 

The final challenge became the weather and keeping the feeders dry! (Apparently feeders covered in water-resistant bags would become curiosities which juvenile monkeys would not be able to resist..)