© 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. Having been also the data manager of IVP, Stef re-uses the exact same methods to create and maintain this new database, making sure that data will be comparable between the two field-sites.
|
Environmental team of Simbithi
Master students & Research assistants
Natacha Bande - From France - January to July 2024
Natacha is a master’s student in the ecology, ethology, and ecophysiology program at the University of Strasbourg, France. After a year spent in the Tai National Park (Ivory Coast) within the Tai Chimpanzee Project where she studied the sooty mangabeys, she joined the UVP team in January 2024 to do her master’s thesis at Simbithi. She will be studying human-vervet interactions, with a special focus on the relationships between vervet monkeys and dogs. She is the main researcher of the Savanna troop. |
Melissa Ardila - From Columbia - March to September 2024
Melissa is a biologist from the Universidad Del Rosario, Colombia and graduated with a MSc in Evolutionary and Behavioural Ecology from the University of Exeter, UK. She is interested in urban ecology and the effects human activities have on animal behaviour. For her MSc she studied herring gulls, a species perceived as a nuisance, and her project focused on how previous experience with humans affects birds’ tolerance towards them. Joining the UVP in 2024 she will research vervet monkeys’ ability to read and interpret human body language and social cues. She is the main researcher of the Pink troop.
Melissa is a biologist from the Universidad Del Rosario, Colombia and graduated with a MSc in Evolutionary and Behavioural Ecology from the University of Exeter, UK. She is interested in urban ecology and the effects human activities have on animal behaviour. For her MSc she studied herring gulls, a species perceived as a nuisance, and her project focused on how previous experience with humans affects birds’ tolerance towards them. Joining the UVP in 2024 she will research vervet monkeys’ ability to read and interpret human body language and social cues. She is the main researcher of the Pink troop.
Oceane Lusher - From Switzerland - March to September 2024
Oceane holds a bachelor’s in biology from the University of Lausanne and she is currently completing her master’s degree in Behaviour, Evolution and Conservation at the same university in Switzerland. For her masters' project, she will join the Urban Vervet Project and study innovative behaviours in semi-urban monkeys, as well as their cognitive abilities. Generally, Oceane has diverse interests including animal behaviour, neuroscience, and conservation. She is the main researcher of the Acacia troop. |
AlumniS
Lindsey Ellington - From New Zealand & USA
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. She helped habituating and worked with Acacia. |
Manon Desaivres - From France
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. She helped habituated and worked with Savanna. |
Zonke Mbutho - From Eastern Cape, South Africa
Zonke, who was working with wild vervet monkeys at IVP joined UVP for two months as a field assistant (April-May 2023) before returning to IVP. She came to help us collecting data on Acacia and on all ongoing projects which passionate her: human-wildlife conflicts. |
Joey Felsch - From Switzerland
Master student from the University of Lausanne who joined UVP from July until December 2023. He investigated dietary traditions in the diet of urban vervet monkeys using molecular approaches (eDNA) thanks to the co-supervision of Luca Fumagalli & Erica van de Waal. For that, 455 faecal samples were collected at UVP during his time! While he used samples from both troops, he was following Savanna. |
Paige Barnes - From the USA
Master student from the University of Zurich, Paige joined UVP in June 2023 and stayed until January 2024. She worked with both Acacia & Savanna and ran boxes' experiments to study the effect of urbanisation on vervet cognition by replicating a social transmission test done with the wild population of IVP (Canteloup 2020). |
Adrian Mc Connell - From Switzerland
Master student from the University of Lausanne who joined UVP in July 2023 until March 2024. Using over 370h of daily focal follows from both troops, he studied how diet composition and acquisition influence vervet monkey adaptation to urbanization. Adrian was following Acacia. |
Shiara Covenden - From KZN, South Africa
Shiara is a South African volunteer from Umhlanga, who helped us few days a week for 3 months (January-March 2024). While she learnt a lot on monkeys' behaviour and enjoyed interacting with the residents, she also helped habituating a third troop that we will start studying: the Pink troop! |