Back in London!

Three months later and I am back in London! I had an amazing time at the Cayo Santiago field station, and although I am pretty sure the monkeys will not miss me, I will miss them keeping me on my toes. Ten macaque mothers sadly lost their babies in the three months I was there, and we were able to collect data on all of them. I witnessed such an interesting range of responses and reactions to their grief, with five mothers seen carrying the dead infants’ corpses. We still have a research assistant out in the field until the end of August, so hopefully, we can expand our dataset further. I am super excited to begin analysing the data for my dissertation and hope to work towards writing a paper to disseminate the results to the broader public. It is too early to make any conclusion, but I am sure whether we find there to be a behavioural change or not in the bereaved mothers, it will have wide-reaching impacts on our understanding of both primate and human behaviour.

I am hugely grateful to everyone who made this research possible, including my fantastic supervisor Alecia Carter, the Caribbean primate research centre team, the best research assistant Flora Talyigas and everyone who supported the project here. If it were not for your insane generosity, we would not have been able to go to Puerto Rico to carry out this exciting and unique study.