© Stephanie Mercier

Principal investigator
Dr. Sofia Forss

​Sofia is an evolutionary biologist specialised on comparative cognition and animal behaviour. Her research focuses on what makes animals explorative and how those underlying traits influence cognitive abilities. She is especially interested in development and how social and ecological variation during ontogeny influence cognitive processes and skill learning. The colonisation of urban habitats presents a biological adaptation process that she found intriguing as it presents interesting avenues for the field of animal cognition. Given that vervet monkeys are one of a few primate species that have successfully nuanced into anthropogenic landscapes, they provide us the excellent opportunity to study the interplay between environmental changes, motivation, and cognitive abilities. 

On-site manager & Project coordinator
Dr. Stephanie mercIer

The long-term experience working with wild vervet monkeys, her love for this sometime naughty species and her desire to take a turn in her carrier brought Stef to a new position for this project. Being the coordinator of this Urban Vervet Project, Stef is setting up the project, communicating with the different team members (IVP, University of Zürich, University of KwaZulu-Natal, the vet & Environmental team from Simbithi and of course all the students involved), ensuring resource availability for data collection and managing the team on-site. In addition to help habituating this new urban population, Stef also participates to data collection (observational & experimental), analysis and writing scientific articles and supervising students. Being also the data manager of IVP, Stef re-uses the exact same methods to create this new database, making sure that data will be comparable between the two field-sites. ​

Environmental team of Simbithi

Ayanda Duma
Environmental manager
Derrick Lilienfeld
Veterinarian

Master students & Research assistants

Paige Barnes - From the USA - June 2023 to January 2024

Paige completed a BS degrees from Michigan State University in both Statistics and Zoology with a concentration in Animal Behaviour and Neurobiology along with a minor in Computer Science. Her behavioural and cognitive experiences includes working with mountain gorillas in Uganda and studying chimpanzees in Africa while a lab manager at the University of Michigan. Paige will join UVP as a Master student from the University of Zurich in June 2023 and she will be working with the Savanna group to study the effect of urbanisation on vervet cognition by replicating a social transmission test done with the wild population of IVP.
Joey Felsch - From Switzerland - July 2023 to December 2023

For his Master's project, Joey will be investigating whether dietary traditions exist in the diet of urban vervet monkeys via molecular approaches. For that, he will collect faecal samples of individuals, prepare them to be exported back to Switzerland, where he will be doing his lab work in collaboration with Luca Fumagalli to analyse the environmental DNA found in vervet monkeys' faeces. While Joey will focus mainly on the Savanna troop, Adrian will help collecting data on the other one, Acacia.
Adrian Mc Connell - From Switzerland - July 2023 to March 2024

​Adrian completed a BS degree from the University of Lausanne in Biology. His interests include zoology, animal behaviour and biodiversity conservation. Adrian will join UVP as a Master student in July 2023 to study how diet composition and acquisition influence vervet monkey adaptation to urbanisation. While Joey will help him collecting data on the Savanna troop, Adrian will focus mainly on Acacia.

Alumni

Lindsey Ellington
Master student from the University of Groningen (Netherlands), she worked at UVP from November 2022 until March 2023 and replicated a study done by Sofia Forss (2021) on curiosity to compare the responses of wild, captive and semi-urban vervet monkeys.
​Manon Desaivres
Master student from the Sorbonne Paris Nord University, she joined UVP from January to June 2023 to study human-vervet interactions, investigating both from the monkeys and the residents’ perspective. 
Zonke Mbutho
Zonke, a field assistant from the Eastern Cape in South Africa, who was working with wild vervet monkeys at IVP joined UVP for two months (April-May 2023) before returning to IVP. She came to help us collecting data on all ongoing projects which passionate her: human-wildlife conflicts.