RAPID: Preservation of the Cayo Santiago macaque colony and post-storm behavioral and biological data in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Extreme and unexpected environmental changes have posed both risks and opportunities for humans and our close primate relatives, in both evolutionary and modern contexts. This RAPID award will support stabilization efforts and data collection in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria from the island of Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico and the free-ranging monkey groups that live there. This project preserves important short-term data during a critical, immediate post-storm period when vegetation and water are limited, landscapes have been changed, but marine resources are more abundant. These data will allow the testing of several hypotheses regarding severe environmental change on behavior and biology. The monkey colony has been well-studied for 79 years, and pre-storm data integrating behavior, genetics and morphology are abundant. These data have been foundational for advances in biological anthropology, primate ecology, cognitive science, and related medical fields. Importantly, this RAPID will support preservation of the Cayo Santiago macaques themselves, by repairing the island water cisterns and feeding corrals. This scientifically necessary infrastructural support provides societal benefits by creating a context in which Cayo staff and local student researchers, all of whom are under-represented minorities, can continue their work. Public access to the research results will be provided through partnership with an NSF-funded science mentoring program. A key to understanding, modeling and mitigating the influence of severe change on humans and nonhuman primates is the combination of quality pre-event data, immediate post-event data, and long-term follow up data. The investigators will pursue several key research questions related to modeling the influence of severe environmental and dietary perturbation on individual plasticity and survival. These questions provide key information for studies in the deep past (human evolution) as well as prospective modelling for better outcomes in future events. Hurricane Maria offers scientific opportunities to test the effect of severe environmental change on behaviors and bodies, precisely because Cayo Santiago has been a rich and foundational resource for long term behavioral study. Primate populations of precise known lineage (pedigree) are rare, and the Cayo Santiago macaques are unique in being free-ranging populations with a long documented history and rich behavioral, genetic and anatomical research programs. The PIs will collect data (resource surveys & isotopic baseline values, animal uptake values) that allow evaluation of post-storm behavior and the consequences of the forced dietary change (from reliance in the first post-storm periods on washed-in marine resources, to greater vegetation and provisioning) with direct relevance to hypotheses about human evolution. Through daily census and observation data, they will assess survival and positioning of social groups and response to shifting landscapes (including passage of the submerged isthmus between islands). These data will add insight to future models of the effects of environmental degradation. The ability to collect these data, as well as ongoing and future long-term studies, requires the survival of the colony. Without the immediate interventions supported here, the comparative science is impossible, the survivors will likely die and the long-term scientific advances that build from them will be terminated.