Comparative Primate Cognition: Lemurs and Red-tailed Monkeys

Red-tailed monkey at the Oakland Zoo.       Photos by     Steven Gotz. Ring-tailed lemur at the Oakland Zoo. Going over the data from Phase One has been surprisingly fun! It has been rewarding to see the data back up what I observed when the animals had the boxes. I am not super tech and number savvy, so my sister has been helping me with that. In the above chart, you can see how many visits to each color of box both the lemurs and the red-tailed monkeys have made, and how those visits fluctuate for each day. It is important to note that for the lemurs, there are more animals and therefore more boxes than there are monkeys, and boxes for the monkeys. It is also possible that the lemurs used their sense of smell to aid them in choosing boxes, but interestingly they almost always chose to engage with yellow boxes first. Red-tailed Monkeys: The above graph and chart show the red-tailed monkeys visits to the boxes during Phase One. You can see that there is ove...

  Busy busy busy! I have now completed Phase One of my project with both the lemurs, and the red-tailed monkeys. It went fantastic! I lost track of the amount of blue and yellow boxes I assembled, painted, and stuffed, and am very thankful to the zookeepers I have been working with for putting the treats in the blue ones, and giving them to the animals every morning for four days this month. I made sure to bring each string a box of pastries as thanks! 😄Throughout Phase One, I also have presented my elevator pitch/research project summary to many zoo guests, staff, and volunteer/intern colleagues at the zoo who have asked me what it is I am doing while I am there. I started Phase One with the lemurs (four ring -tailed lemurs, and two crowned lemurs) on June 15 th , and start times varied between 9:40 – 10:15 am depending on when the zookeeper came out to put the boxes on exhibit. Mirroring the results with the red-tailed monkeys, the lemurs were all very excited about the boxes at...