To use the Automated Radio Telemetry System (ARTS) on BCI for my thesis work, I needed to get radio collars on capuchins. At the beginning of August, a whole crew of people came down to BCI to help me do this. Bob Lessnau is the head zoologist at the St. Catherine’s Island Primate Sanctuary, and has many years experience darting wild primates. He very kindly volonteered his time to come down and help me dart capuchins for my study.
He brought his student, Robyn Hoing, to help. She is a student at Armstrong Atlantic State University, and also works as a vet. tech.
Michelle Brown and Jen Boothby rounded out the darting team.
It was really important to me to have the best people working with me to make sure the collaring process was as safe as possible. We had a really hard, stressful week, but Bob, Robyn, Michelle and Jen were all fantastic!
Darting monkeys is hard,stressful, traumatic at the best of times. First off, you have to find the monkeys. Having so many people here helping made all the difference for this aspect. Michelle and Jen, especially, did a lot of hard hiking trying to track down capuchins. My PhD work is focused on the relationships between capuchin social groups, so we were trying to collar one adult male and one adult female in as many social groups as we could. At the beginning of the week, it was relatively easy to find the groups we needed. By the end, it seemed like we kept running into the same social groups we had already darted.
Once we found a group, we had to find individuals that we could collar. They had to be fully adult, so they wouldn’t outgrow the collars. We also didn’t want to dart females with young infants. Once we’d identified the monkey we wanted, we had to wait until it was in a good position: low to the ground, not near any hills or sudden drop offs, facing away from us, and not near other monkeys. It required a lot of searching to get a clean shot.
After the monkey is darted, one person kept an eye on it and directed two people holding the hammock that we used to catch the monkeys when they fell. The one to two minutes from the time a monkey was darted to when it was safely on the ground were my least favorite moments of the week.
“After the fall”
Once the monkey was safely on the ground, the first thing we did was take its temperature, heart rate and respiration rate to make sure it was OK. Then we started taking measurements.
After weighing each monkey, measuring their limbs, looking at their teeth, and drawing blood, we put on the radio collars. The collars weigh 48 grams (less than 2% of a female capuchin’s body weight), and last 480-700 days. The painted stripes on the collar will help me identify individuals in the forest. This female, Idefix, was the last capuchin we caught, and one of the prettiest capuchins. She was young and healthy, but she had healed break in one of her leg bones.
After putting on the collar, we just had to wait for the drugs to wear off. Each monkey we caught had a different reaction to the drugs. Some barely went to sleep at all, and were awake and climbing within two hours. Others took a lot longer to wake up.
Once the radio collars were on the monkeys, the ARTS could start collecting data on their movements. There are 7 towers on BCI with 6-unit directional antenna on top.
These antenna use differences in signal strength to calculate which direction a radio-collared animal is in relation to the tower. This data is used to triangulate the location of the animal. Right now, ARTS collecting data on the location of each of my monkeys once every four minutes.
Darting was really tiring and stressful. We were very successful, though. We put collars on nine monkeys in six different social groups. This is a really good start for my thesis work. And even though we worked really, really hard, we still had some fun!
