Comparative Primate Cognition: Lemurs and Red-tailed Monkeys

 The past week was busy busy busy, but so fun! I definitely had a minor panic attack thinking that I was forgetting something, was going to mess something up, etc haha, but everything went smoothly with no issues save for some minor technical difficulties! Also, I am a freaking boss at assembling and painting small boxes now, so yay for new skills I guess. 😝 Those technical difficulties being that on my way to the zoo the first morning driving through Grizzly Peak, I somehow shifted my car into manual and had to pull over and restart the car to get it to go back to normal, my GoPro was being a total diva and not wanting to cooperate, my camera does not take good video, I accidentally stopped my stopwatch halfway through day three, and there was a minor learning curve learning how to use my voice recorder. BUT! I managed to solve all those issues. Funnily enough, despite all my more "high-tech" equipment, my best tool besides the voice recorder has been my old iPhone lol --- ...

 Worked up a brief summary of my research in a neat, under 250 word pitch as per my SURF workshop directions. Now if only I could string together something half as organized as this when people ask me in person what I am doing! 😂 "In the fields of primatology and animal science, it is generally considered that haplorrhines , the order containing primates more closely related to humans, possess greater cognitive powers than strepsirrhines , the order containing more distantly related primate, like lemurs. I will be investigating this assumption through the observational analysis and testing of haplorrhine red-tailed monkeys, and strepsirrhine ring-tailed and crowned lemurs at the Oakland Zoo. Two different colors of boxes will be presented to the animals, and cognitive abilities will be inferred from factors such as how long the animals take to explore and open the new stimulus, how long it takes them to figure out which color has food inside, and then after periods of absence f...

 The last couple of days have been spent prepping the cardboard boxes for phase one of the project. First up with them, will be the red-tailed monkeys! Said cuties! 😍 A true test for me: figuring out how to correctly assemble the flat 5x5 boxes that I ordered online lol. I passed! Then I needed to paint them: half yellow, and half blue. I used non-toxic Crayola paint, so as not to cause any harm to the animals. Can you say preschool memories haha? ♪ I'm blue da ba dee da ba di 🎵 Yellow and blue: colors that lemurs can see! Red-tailed monkeys have the same color vision that humans do, but lemurs are red/green colorblind, as mentioned in my early blog post. So therefore everyone will be getting blue and yellow boxes to keep things simple. Blue boxes will be filled with yummy treats. Yellow boxes will be empty.  Smells like a preschool haha!  And now, I am filling the boxes with some crumpled up butcher paper. This is a safe material for the animals that will make sure no ...

On May 15th I went to the zoo specifically to observe the red-tailed monkeys and lemurs that I will be working with for this project. Basically just to get a feel for the specific animals and their natural tendencies and behaviors.                                                     Results: everyone is absolutely darling haha! 😍                                                                And some more photos! Unfortunately I haven't been able to take any decent photos of the red-tailed monkeys, as their exhibit is enclosed with wire mesh. Red-tailed monkey, by Nathan Rupert The handsome male crowned lemur! ...