[0:00:12 Speaker 0] Yeah. Mhm. Yeah, mm hmm, 

[0:00:30 Speaker 1] mm hmm. Okay. Welcome everyone to hot Science at home. We're so glad you could join us tonight at the University of texas at Austin's Environmental Science Institute proud to bring you the latest and coolest advancements in science through Hot Science at home. Let me hear you give a shout out. At least in the comments if you think science is the coolest thing. Well, that's that's a pretty that's a pretty deafening set of comments. Thank you. Please join me in welcoming tonight Professor Tony de Fiori, our special guest for this evening. Welcome dr de Fiori. How are you tonight? 

[0:01:26 Speaker 0] I'm doing great jay. Nice to be here as always chatting with you. 

[0:01:30 Speaker 1] Yeah, dr d is an anthropologist. He studies primates during his PhD. He established a primate research area in Ecuador, in the rainforest. And then after stints at the Smithsonian institution in new york university, he came to the University of texas at Austin where he is chair of the department of anthropology, Tony is an expert in the natural history and social behavior of wooly monkeys and spider monkeys. Tell us Tony about where you do your work. It sounds like it's pretty, pretty remote. What's what's involved in getting 

[0:02:04 Speaker 0] there. Well, this is a picture from a drone hovering a couple 100 ft above the research site where I work in Amazonian Ecuador. We're looking west here towards the Andes, they're kind of obscured in the clouds. But if you were to rotate around and and look in any direction you'd see forests like this stretching out for miles and miles. It is remote. It's a gorgeous tropical and very remote piece of, of Amazonian rainforest. To get here from Austin takes about 24 hours of travel first we fly from Austin to Miami from Miami to Quito, the capital of Ecuador. Um From there we take another plane or a bus down from the Andes into the lowlands to a little town called coca, which is on the napa river, a big tributary of the amazon. We go down river a couple of hours from there, get on a bus on a on a gravel road, travel a couple of hours by bus and then get on another boat, canoe, a smaller canoe on this river here, the Rio t Puccini and travel a couple of hours down river to get to this field station. It's a very remote place, 

[0:03:13 Speaker 1] wow. And it looks really lush. Like I always imagine rainforest. I can imagine just hacking your way through the underbrush, trying to find your way and you're on the ground moving through this terrain. What's it sound like? 

[0:03:26 Speaker 0] We're gonna play here. A little audio clip that's a recording, a couple of merging of a couple of recordings taken by one of my graduate students who is working on the soundscape at this very cool Amazonian place. So we're just, I'm gonna go quiet for a second, you're gonna hear what it sounds like on an early morning walking through the frame forest and then we'll come back and I'll tell you what you heard there. 

[0:03:47 Speaker 1] Awesome. 

[0:04:00 Speaker 0] A so you heard a couple of things that 1st, 1st off it's not super loud, but there's a lot of a lot of stuff going on in that recording. There's bugs there that you can hear. There are birds that you can here. And then there were two species of non human primates that you heard in there. The first one that kind of that was a td monkey. And so this is an early morning call. You can hear td monkeys chorus sing in the morning. Uh and then on top of that you heard the call? That was that's the loud call of this guy that we're looking at here. J this is a spider mellie spider monkey, a white bellied spider monkey, which is one of the two largest species of primates that you find at that site. 

[0:04:49 Speaker 1] Wow, that was a pretty sounded pretty accurate to me. Is that just because you like to do impressions and make make fun of them? Or is it actually useful for communicating with them? When you're 

[0:04:59 Speaker 0] well, we try not to communicate with them, but we do use that call, We listen for that call um when we're trying to find a spider monkey group to find and follow. This is another. And so there are 10 different species of non human primates that can be found at this site, it's a very diverse site in terms of its primate community. I mentioned spider monkeys already. This is a second species of the 10 that are there. These are wooly monkeys that are, this is uh a female wooly monkey right here. And those two species, spider monkeys and wooly monkeys are the largest bodied primates that are found in this in this site. 

[0:05:37 Speaker 1] Wow, these are some really cool looking creatures. Um boy with their, with their reach with their length, with their I imagine they have a great vertical, they look like they'd be really skilled at ultimate frisbee, but you know, they don't look quite like the apes I'm used to seeing king kong or jane, Goodall's friends. What's up with that? Mhm. 

[0:05:58 Speaker 0] Well, all of the primates in the Americas belonged to a lineage of non human primates that diverged separated from the last common ancestor that we had with apes in africa and asia, Somewhere between 35 and 40 million years ago. So what we're looking at right here is kind of a stylist, evolutionary tree of the primate order and the monkeys that you've just seen a couple of pictures of and heard me imitate and heard some recordings of are all part of this little lineage right here that diverged from the lineage leading to monkeys in africa and asia and all of the african and asian apes, a really long time ago. This, this evolutionary tree kind of obscures the fact that there's a whole bunch of monkeys on this lineage depending on the expert that you listen, to there's somewhere around 200-250 different species of and and sub species of monkeys in the Americas. 

[0:07:02 Speaker 1] Okay, so everything on that red evolutionary line are the things you showed us, you've you've you've imitated etc. And then all the others are where Jane Goodall's friends would be very, very interesting 40 million years to make a difference. But what is it that's causing you to focus on the Williams, spiders? What is it about these creatures that's basically driven you to commit your career to understanding them? 

[0:07:29 Speaker 0] Yeah. You say, driven to commit my career. I've been working in in tropical South America with these guys for close to 30 years now, which is staggering. 

[0:07:37 Speaker 1] Honestly, there 

[0:07:39 Speaker 0] are a couple of things that are really interesting and why I focus on these two uh species more than most of the others at the site. Although we do some work with some of the other ones as well. The main reason and you can see, you know, physically they look different. You're absolutely right to notice that these uh spider monkeys from south America and central America and chimpanzees from Africa look very different. The just morphological e the spider monkeys wooly monkeys have this cool feature of their of their morphology, what they look like. That's that prehensile tail. Uh and apes like us don't have a tail. Right? So physically they're very different. But the wooly monkeys and spider monkeys show some interest and their close relatives in in the Americas shows some interesting convergences with some of the african great apes in aspects of their social biology and aspects of their social organization. So one of the things that we know about chimpanzees and about spider monkeys, for example, is that or that we've suspected for a long time was that the males in a group are pretty closely related to one another and that females when they reach sexual maturity, they move to other groups. That's a really rare pattern in mammals. But it seems to be something that characterizes some of the african great apes and some of the members of this group of prehensile tailed primates in the Americas, they also both livin large multi male, multi female groups. Males cooperate with one another within these groups. And at least interestingly in the willy and spider monkeys, males are very, very tolerant of one another. So you've probably seen um documentaries where you see chimpanzee males jockeying for dominance? Well, that's actually an interesting difference between, despite these convergences I've mentioned between willie and spider monkeys where males are super tolerant of one another and and chimpanzees where they form dominance hierarchies. And so that's what prompted me that those kind of convergences and interesting differences. What's prompted me to work on these primates in the Americas because of superficial similarities and convergences. So 

[0:09:52 Speaker 1] it seems like you've made some very fundamental discoveries about these monkeys. How do you go about gathering this information? Do you send them? Send them a survey through facebook? What do you do? 

[0:10:04 Speaker 0] We don't we don't send them a survey through facebook as you might imagine from that um Images that you saw in the forest. It's difficult to follow them around. So we are on the ground. These monkeys are 25-30 m up in the tree. So we use a lot of different techniques to study their behavioral biology. We'll put radio collars on them so we'll dart a couple of individuals put radio collars on them so that we can track them through the forest. We follow them and do our observational studies. So we look at what they're doing and take detailed notes on what they're eating and where they're moving. But there's a lot of stuff that we can't tell by observational data alone and that's where we turn to genetic data. Right? We collect samples from these animals and we analyze those samples the D. N. A. In those samples to understand how they're related to one another. This what you're seeing on the right hand side here is an example of how we collect our samples for DNA analysis. I can't tell you how many times over the past 25 years I've been pooped on by monkeys. That's a really rich source of genetic material for doing studies of relatedness and parentage. So here I've just gotten pooped on by a wooly monkey will take that poop sample, scrape it off our shirt, pick it up off the ground, put it in a little buffer that preserves the D. N. A. And then bring it back to Austin to extract DNA from it and do genetic analyses. 

[0:11:30 Speaker 1] Wow. Is it is it tough to engage your new graduate students and collaborators in this method? 

[0:11:37 Speaker 0] You have to like to get pooped on by monkeys. You have to not at least be shy about being pooped on by monkeys. And and so when we pull new people into the study that that's one of the things that we we tell them all the time. Uh The key piece of advice that we have is keep your mouth closed if you're gonna and we spend a lot of time looking up right? Um It inspires our graduate students to do things like this. We have we've had a poop haiku contest previously. I think the next slide is going to show you, Yeah, there's one of the, one of the early poop haiku has to come out of our contest. Do spider monkeys swinging through the forest trees. May I have your poop? That's what we're asking of 

[0:12:12 Speaker 1] them. Excellent. Sign me up. What what are some of your key findings from this. 

[0:12:22 Speaker 0] So I'll highlight a couple of things you asked about some key findings. I'll highlight two things that we know about spider monkeys a little better than we did uh, a number of years ago, from both observational studies and then from these genetic studies. First off, when we're following animals around, we look at where they go. Right. And so what I'm going to show you here is the area of use for a typical male spider monkey from the community that we've been working with. This is an adult male named Toto, who was one of the the original adult males that was in in this group. And we started working with them in 2000 and five. Each little dot here represents a sighting of poteau within the roughly six square kilometer home range that these animals will use. And this little purple blob here represents kind of the area of highest density where you're most likely to find proto. So this is a the range map area of use for a typical adult male. And and I think on the next slide we have a range map or area of use for a typical adult female. Right? It's a lot smaller. So this is a female named anna. Each one of these dots again represents a sighting location for her. And if you were to flip back and forth between these, you'd see that photos range is a heck of a lot bigger than anna's range. On average, the area that males are using is a habitually is about twice the size of the area that an individual female we use. And if you superimpose all of the ranges of males from this group on one another, it's this big area that covers encompasses the ranges of more than one adult female. Right? And so males, male spider monkeys will travel together. They'll collectively patrol and try to repel other males from this kind of area. And we think they're protecting access to a set of to the ranges that are being used by a set of a set of females. 

[0:14:14 Speaker 1] That's really something. So you see the males doing these really interesting behaviors of like guarding the perimeter and this is stuff. This difference between male and female behaviors is all from just sort of tracking them. But what do the D. N. A. Results show you? What are the rich rewards you've gotten from from sampling and analyzing the poop. So 

[0:14:35 Speaker 0] one of the things that that I think I mentioned that we can do when we have a fecal sample from an animal, we can extract DNA from it and then we can use that D. N. A. To do a bunch of different things. One of the things that we can do with that D. N. A. Is to look at how closely related individuals are to get an estimate of how closely related individuals are to one another. So we'll have a DNA sample from for example a male named Lucas, a male named juan. Soto geronimo Pedro Sammy. These were all males. This set of six males. Those were the resident adults and sub adult males that were present in this group in 2000 and five when we started working with them. And so when we extract DNA from them and look at how they're related to one another. What I'm showing in this slide here, these dark lines represent a father son relationship between these individuals. So juan one is the father of heroin, amo Pedro and Sammy. And then a lighter line here shows that there is a non there's not an insignificant degree of relatedness between this pair of males. So wan and proto also share some commonality in their D. N. A. That's more off more more extensive than you would expect by chance. Right. So this is a set of males who are related to one another. Now, if you look at these males, if you sample individuals over time and I think the next slide is going to show kind of a history of males in this group. Some of the males die or disappear. But other males who are born that were juveniles or newborns in this group have grown up in the last 10 years. And you can see they're all part of an extended set of related males. Right? So Andrea was another son of Juan Mono. An inky you're a son of Poteau Lorenzo is a son of a monkey and 

[0:16:22 Speaker 1] a whole 

[0:16:23 Speaker 0] set of males. Um They're they're related to another. It's a petrol line, right? Individuals who are descended individual males who are descended from from a common ancestor, Common male ancestor in the past. And we know that from the genetic data, we would not know that otherwise. Right. The story is very different for females. Right? And so the next slide is going to show you what a similar situation for females in 2005. When we started working with these animals. If you look at the estimated relatedness among a set, the set of females who were present, some of them show a non insignificant, non insignificant degree of relatedness with one another. But most of them are not at all related to one another. Less related than you would expect by chance. If you look through time, then at what's happened with the females in the group over time. Again, a number of them have died or disappeared. But then there are a series of individuals who have immigrated. Series of females who have immigrated, either as sub adults or as adult females into the group. Co Tinga Juliet, the tiger Roomba, Fiona Gaia areas over the last 8-10 years. All of them also are unrelated to the females who are already resident and also to the males that are there. So this paints a picture of what we I think suspected about spider monkeys for a long time about the composition of these groups. The composition of the groups is really made up of a core of related males and unrelated females. And that explains something about males behavior. I mentioned that they're cooperative with one another, that they jointly patrol arranged that they are not agonist IQ with one another. They don't fight with one another. They don't form dominance hierarchies and that's consistent with them being pretty close relatives. Right? And sharing a lot of their their genetic material, 

[0:18:14 Speaker 1] wow, that is really something that you could decipher all of that and then unraveling it in terms of comparisons with um the african primate groups that you contrast them to. Some are similar somewhere different. You want to comments about that. 

[0:18:30 Speaker 0] One of the one of the things that this is that's striking about this pattern in in uh spider monkeys that I've talked about and and we see similar things with wooly monkeys that the there are important differences there as well. But this pattern that we see in spider monkeys both behaviorally and in terms of the relatedness among males within groups, that's that's something that we see in chimpanzee groups as well. Right? There are sets of related males in chimpanzee groups who um you know, cooperate with one another, do things with one another. And and so it's um not just an ecological or a behavioral convergence, but I think the genetic data tells us something about kind of the structural convergence in in terms of how um you know, the what the social composition of groups is like in terms of relatedness. 

[0:19:22 Speaker 1] Right on. I imagine these fantastic creatures from hearing you talk about them and our conversations we had pretty much imagine they're not immune from the impact of human activities. What's the state of conservation issues in this area? 

[0:19:38 Speaker 0] Well, any any large bodied primate like a wooly monkey or a spider monkey, They require a large area and uh to live in right. And they are heavily impacted because they're long lived because they have offspring only at very long intervals. Kind of like human interval, birth intervals 34, 4.5 years. They are very susceptible to anthropogenic activities. Right. And so one thing that we know from studying along with primates around the world is that the large bodied species are important harbingers of human impacts this particular area, the Yasuni National Park. The Yasuni biosphere reserve is a super important area for primate biodiversity. It's and it's and it's also a super important area for biodiversity, generally on a global scale. So, I'm showing you a picture right here, um that is a super imposition of a heat map of biodiversity measures for a couple of different major groups of organisms in Amazonian and other parts of tropical south America. The point that I want to make this is with this figure is this really red hot area right here. That's an area where the biodiversity kind of the measure of species richness, the number of different individual species of birds, amphibians, mammals, plants um overlaps high numbers of those of high levels of biodiversity. And all of those groups overlap right over top of this locust in the Western amazon that Yasuni is part of the Yasuni biosphere reserve is part of it. So it's a really important area for biodiversity maintenance globally. And it's if you're interested in in um in conservation of tropical biodiversity, I'd encourage you to do a little bit of looking into um biodiversity in this area. You can visit this website will talk a little bit about the station that I've I've mentioned and the biodiversity in the area. 

[0:21:46 Speaker 1] Great, thank you so much Tony. Just fascinating stuff. Are you interested in taking some questions? 

[0:21:53 Speaker 0] I'd be happy 

[0:21:55 Speaker 1] viewers 

[0:21:56 Speaker 0] happy to take that there's nothing that I like more than talking about monkeys And the and the trouble. So I'd be happy to take some questions 

[0:22:03 Speaker 1] right on. Let's get into it. All right. Our first question comes from Miriam and she's asking are they very territorial? Would they behave violently with outsiders? 

[0:22:15 Speaker 0] So I can talk I can contrast the wooly monkeys and spider monkeys a little bit. The spider monkeys are very territorial with one another. So groups of males when they encounter groups of males from one group. When they encounter groups of males from another group, they yell, they shake branches, they are in general pretty intolerant during interactions with males from other, social groups and there's actually, you know, that jay mentioned this or j you you kind of picked up on the fact that I said this. Sometimes we'll see male spider monkeys from one of the groups that we're studying. And I actually moved to the boundaries of their territory and do what we call patrolling behavior where they'll move along the boundary. And we think that they're paying attention trying to be sensitive to incursions from other groups of males. And sometimes they'll make incursions into other groups of males territories as well. There's actually an area between adjacent home ranges, adjacent territories that you don't often see males and you don't often see anybody in in the spider monkeys. Right. And so we think they have these kind of discrete territories and they're really intolerant another, it's very different with wooly monkeys. And I didn't really talk very much about wooly monkeys in this uh in this, in what I've presented so far. But wooly monkey social groups have territories that overlap a lot. We wouldn't call them territories, right? They're not areas discrete, used local science space that are, are defended. And you'll actually see individuals from different groups of wooly monkeys occasionally interacting with one another. Sometimes they'll form subgroups with individuals from other groups. And that was the subject of one of my recent graduate students PhD work looking at these intergroup relationships between wooly monkeys and one thing that we know is if you take a much bigger from the genetic code. If you take a much bigger landscape level lens, wooly monkeys tend to have relatives in groups around them. Um And we don't say that to the same extent the spider monkeys. 

[0:24:19 Speaker 1] Um Next we have from Jillian more of a comment than a question, she says, Whoa, that's crazy. Thank you, thank you Julian for that. And then uh Makita also with a comment. Not a question. She says cool, alright, but moving on to some some some questions here, Katie asks uh a question. Let me let me put it to you, Tony have there been any noticeable outcomes related to the homo sagacity amongst the males? Has this impacted the overall genetic diversity among the species? 

[0:24:55 Speaker 0] So, um your your 

[0:24:58 Speaker 1] 1st 1st please. Sorry to interrupt, but that may win the question for the contest for the most advanced question tonight. Can you define for our audience and me homo sagacity? 

[0:25:09 Speaker 0] Homocide velocity would be a situation where you don't see a lot of genetic variability within an individual, right? Um and what I will say what we know from the genetic data, these are very variable individuals and the group level. There are quite variable groups genetically right? That we don't see any um kind of evidence of what we would call inbreeding depression. We don't see elevated levels of homocysteine gossipy having the same, this is a little technical having the same alley ill at both copies that we have on, on chromosomal pair right individually. Animals are quite diverse. They tend to have different alleles at the low side that we look at them on, on homologous copies of the chromosome. So there's, and there's a lot of genetic diversity present in these, in these individuals and groups still part of that is because this is a pretty remote area. And the impacts of humans in this area haven't been so extreme that the population is, is, has been depleted to such a level that the genetic diversity has been substantially reduced. That's different. If you look at primates living in fragments a forest where they've been isolated for a long period of time. So no Katie, we have not noticed any noticeable outcomes related to them being close. Uh, you know, super highly inbred. Again, if you look in in most directions, you fly up in one of those above the, of the field site, you look in most directions, you're not going to see a lot of human um, interventions in the forest. There are some, there are people that live there. There are economic interests that are that are at play there. But the forest isn't super fragmented. And so we're not seeing the consequences of that yet. 

[0:27:06 Speaker 1] Great. Thanks. Our next question comes from rob. He wants to know what's the lifespan of the Williams, spider monkeys. 

[0:27:14 Speaker 0] Great, great question in captivity, they can live quite a long time in captivity. They can live up to up to 40 or 45 years um based on the genetic data that we have. And kind of inferring About who we know, who we can tell with genetic data. Um were the parents of individuals who had to have been born in this social media. I'm going to do a little bit of a calculation here for you. But for example, when we first started sampling animals in 2005 or so, we could get we could uh get get samples from individuals who are sub adults or very large juveniles at that time for, and they must have been four or five years old at that time. Right? So we can tell then who among the individuals in the group were the mom and dad. Of those individuals who were four or five in 2000 and five. Right, So they had to have been born in in say 2000 and 1999. And we know from some of our other data that individual females and individual males don't start reproducing until they're at least six or seven years old. So if you kind of do the math backwards and look at who had, who was identified, who was present and identified as a mom or a dad Of a kid who was present in 2005, had to have been born in 2000, their mom or dad had to have been at least seven years old at that time. We can infer that some of the animals who are around right now have to be 28, years old, something like that. There could be older than that, but that's, you know, at minimum for certain individuals. 28 29. So that's a really long, really long lifespan in the wild. 

[0:28:58 Speaker 1] Cool. Very. 

[0:28:59 Speaker 0] Did I talk to the math? Okay there. 

[0:29:02 Speaker 1] I think so, I followed it. Uh So Miriam has another question she asked. So if a female has a female offspring, do those off female offspring immigrate to another group when they come of age? 

[0:29:15 Speaker 0] They do, yes. So every every female who we have seen born in this group since 2005 and every female who was a Large juvenile or a sub adult, a pre dispersal age individual in 2005 has left. The group has disappeared from the group by the time they're about six years old, that's kind of the average age at dispersal between five and six. So, females and kids generally will hang out with their moms for a large number of years in spider monkeys, right? They'll wander around with their moms. Um but when females get to be about five or so they start being, they start we see them independent of their moms and then suddenly they're gone and then individuals who seem to be about the same age 5.5 6 years old are the ones that are coming in and showing up in the group as well, 

[0:30:08 Speaker 1] Wow! So a 500 year old is actually just going off to find their way through the world. And this brings me to my next comment. People are giving shout outs and greeting Girl scouts who are listening. So if there's any five or six year old Girl Scouts listening, um you don't have to go off out into the world, but please ask a question. We'd love to hear what you guys are thinking 

[0:30:32 Speaker 0] on that. They recognize that five or six year old female spider monkeys are not quite at the age when they're gonna first reproduce, but they're pretty close. Right? So the 1st 1st reproduction is about seven or so 

[0:30:48 Speaker 1] fascinating. Here's a question from Gillian. How would one get started in this field? 

[0:30:55 Speaker 0] Um That's a great question, Gillian. I can tell you how I got started and I think it's a pretty, pretty typical um Pretty typical example when I was a college student, I had a fantastic inspiring anthropology professor who studied primates for her kind of her research and I took a couple of classes in primate behavior with this professor. I ended up going to work with her um advisor as a graduate student. And he and I had no idea what I was gonna, but I loved primates. Um He brought me to Ecuador in 1991 for my very first field field expedition to Ecuador and I just fell in love with being in in a tropical for I mean there's really apart from with my family there is no place that I would rather be than in a wet humid bird, monkey, monkey, poop, bug filled rainforest. And so you know there's there's there's both and I think that's a pretty typical experience for how one how one gets started. One usually is I think inspired by by a mentor and then you know seeking out those opportunities to get some experience in the field and seeing if you if you like it. 

[0:32:14 Speaker 1] There you go Jillian you're on your way and I'm going to guess in about 12 years dr d Fury will expect to see an application to his graduate program from you. So there you go. We have a question from laura here, are there any reasons why monkeys that typically live in the canopy would come down to the ground? She's seven years old by the way. What an awesome question. 

[0:32:36 Speaker 0] What a great question. And yeah honestly there are some reasons why monkeys that typically live in the canopy come down to the ground. They don't do it a lot but spider monkeys and howler monkeys which is another species that I didn't talk about will not often but regularly come down to the ground and feed on soil or drink water from from particular areas that are called solid arrows or sell a dose or mineral licks. Right? So you've probably heard of deer in the U. S. Visiting mineral licks and and drinking um water or licking um stumps and stuff that are that are present in there. Well there are comparable sites that spider monkeys, howler monkeys and a number of other mammalian and avian tax to routinely will visit. And and to do that they come down to the ground. So for a spider monkey or a howler monkey to come down to the ground and eat soil it's a big deal. It's super interesting and I will say they are really cautious when they do it. So if you think about these monkeys that are way up in the canopy they're protected from most of the things that might be able to prey on them. But when they come down to the ground they're vulnerable to terrestrial predators. Like big cats, pumas, jaguar of which this site there are a good number of them at this site. So when we are watching spider monkeys and we follow them to an area where there's a mineral lick they often will spend several hours just kind of hanging around in the area looking down at the ground sometimes coming close to the ground and and peering around and then eventually we'll decide if it's safe to come down and and actually start feeding on the ground they don't when they do come to the ground they don't do it all at once. It's usually one or two at a time and others are still up in the trees around them so they're super cautious, but there are these moments when they come to the ground and wooly monkeys will come to the ground interestingly to feed occasionally on swarms of army ants. There aren't very many critters in the tropics that eat army ants, wooly monkeys and a couple of other species of primates um will actually come down to the ground and and from time to time eat army ants, 

[0:34:51 Speaker 1] wow. They will wait hours checking it out to make sure it's safe before. That's that is patience. Yeah. 

[0:35:00 Speaker 0] The other thing I'll say about that, that j though in addition to just waiting around and probably checking out if it's safe, those mineral licks and the area around them we think are kind of social hotspots for them, right? You can come there and spider monkeys didn't really mention this, but spider monkeys, you don't usually see the whole group traveling around together. They'll travel around in a bunch of different groups and sometimes they'll coalesce at these mineral licks and the way that we tend to think about it, they coalesce in a mineral, that's a great time to catch up with what everyone else has been doing right, you can go and hang out with them and sniff them and and interact with them socially. And so even though they're also super cautious about coming down to the ground. It's also social time and kids from different females who may have been wandering around independently of one another, will play with each other about the mineral licks. So it's really a, it's kind of like going to the playground 

[0:35:52 Speaker 1] except for the pumas and jaguars 

[0:35:54 Speaker 0] and and the people down below collecting your boob. 

[0:35:56 Speaker 1] Have you ever encountered a puma or jaguar in your field? 

[0:36:02 Speaker 0] Um I've seen a couple while I've been on the river. I have seen one while I've been in the forest. There are lots of our assistance and lots of people who work at the station who have been more, I'll say fortunate than me to see puma and jaguar and in in the field, I, you know, I am a clumsy person in the field and I make a lot of noises. I go crashing through like this. And I'm, you know, I, I tall enough that I whacked my head on branches all the time. And so I don't, I don't think I'm very subtle. And so I think if puma or jaguar were there, they'd be detecting me and moving away from me and I'd be unlikely to see them for that reason. And I don't see them hurt, 

[0:36:49 Speaker 1] odds are many more of them have seen you than you've seen them. So here's a couple of questions about their diet. Let me ask them both at once. You can answer it together first is from Narcissist mia. She said, what did willie and spider monkeys eat? Do they eat plants as well as animals. And then there was an earlier question from Mark about concerning seed dispersal. Why do monkeys ignore barrels, preferring pulpy fruits? 

[0:37:14 Speaker 0] So on on both of those questions. Both Willie and spider monkeys eat mostly mostly ripe fruit, mostly right, fruit, that's the major part of their diet. Spider monkeys almost never eat any kind of animal prey. Occasionally we've seen them eat caterpillars. Occasionally we've seen them eat some kind of flying insects that we were never able to identify, but that's super, super rare 70 plus percent of the diet of what spider monkeys eat are things that we would think of as as kind of fleshy ripe fruits. There's an enormous diversity obviously of those kinds of fruits and tropical for us. So 250 to 300 different species that we know of that. Over the course of our studies, their wooly monkeys and spider monkeys each have been eating wooly monkeys do eat some animal prey. I said they army ants, they eat other kinds of ants as well. Um if they can get it. And this is rare, we've only seen a handful of times, but they are perfectly happy to nosh on a snake or a frog or a lizard, but they don't, they don't focus on those. Again, they're focusing mostly on fruits as as a food source concerning the question about arrows and preferring pulpy fruits. They do eat barrels. Um, so there are a couple of what are called D hiss and fruits are fruits that kind of open up like this and they've got generally a C that's covered with a um not a sweet pulpy, sugary um outer layer but a more bitter arrow. So things like things from the nutmeg family, for example, wooly monkeys and spider monkeys love those and and they will tear into the, those deficient fruits even before they open up and eat the arrows. Um you know before they're fully mature. 

[0:38:58 Speaker 1] Great, well we're running we're running out of time, but you have time for a couple of more quick things. One, it's just a comment from Brenda. She says it's really funny that being pooped on by monkeys is a job requirement. 

[0:39:09 Speaker 0] Absolutely agree with you there Brenda. And and it it particularly when my kids were in elementary school, it was um very amusing for them to be able to to share. That's what their dad does for a living. 

[0:39:24 Speaker 1] And perhaps the last question. And my favorite question of the evening comes from juliana. Do the monkeys use any tools in their daily lives? 

[0:39:33 Speaker 0] So there are species of monkeys that use tools, none of the ones that we work with. And we have not seen any of the monkeys that we work with in Ecuador, any of the 10 species that are, they're using tools there. Capuchin monkeys, which is one of the species that are there one of the genera that are there in other sites are habitual users, regular users of tools, but willie monkeys and spider monkeys. Yeah. 

[0:40:01 Speaker 1] Okay, great. Well, I think everybody joins me in thanking dr d for this fascinating stuff. And I would like to let everyone know you can find more information out about Tony's work and watch his full talk that he gave a number of years ago through our hot Science cool talk Archives. Just go to just go to the Hot Science cool talks dot org and search the archives and you'll come up with his hour long talk and half hour session of answering questions if you'd like to learn more about what we heard tonight. But for now, please join me in. Thanking Dr dee. 

[0:40:41 Speaker 0] Thank you jay. 

[0:40:43 Speaker 1] Have a wonderful evening, everybody. We'll see you at the next one. 

[0:40:48 Speaker 0] Mhm