Summary of the 2021 American Society of Primatologists conference

Abstract

The 43rd Meeting of the American Society of Primatologists (ASP) kicked off with a welcome from local host Janette Wallis, Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, and ASP President Lynne Isbell. Over 150 participants attended the 4-day event, which featured roughly 120 scientific presentations. As is common at these meetings, behavior management and conservation featured prominently in many of the sessions. Specifically, there were four plenary sessions, four symposia, three roundtables, 10 oral podium sessions, two workshops, a speed mentoring event, and a comprehensive poster session with 36 presentations. In the first plenary session, Melanie Graham (U Minnesota) provided a succinct summary of the impact of animal-centric behavioral management on primate welfare and comparative model efficacy and reminded us of the ongoing value of primate models for diabetes research because, “insulin is not a cure, it's what we give our patients to keep them from dying.” Her work demonstrates that researchers can improve the welfare of laboratory animals through cooperative handling and positive reinforcement during medical care and procedures. Her results show that repeatedly sedated animals, compared to cooperatively handled animals, show indicators of increased physiological stress—and Graham argues that such techniques also add uncontrolled variance to comparative research. Positive reinforcement training can give patients (and primate subjects) the skills to cope with and respond to medical interventions. Using training, welfare, and behavioral management techniques, researchers can generate data that are more informative and more efficiently gathered and promote healthier outcomes for our research animals and human patients. In the second plenary session, Susan Alberts (Duke University), recipient of the 2019 Distinguished Primatologist Award, addressed the role of social effects and relationships on health and mortality at the Amboseli Baboon Research Project. She described how both early life environments (e.g., social, parental, and ecological influences) and adult social experiences (e.g., social status and affiliative social relationships) are linked to survival in wild baboons and humans alike. Amazingly, even just one adverse early experience doubles a female baboon's risk of death at every adult age. Alberts also presented intergenerational data, which showed that a mother losing a maternal caregiver at an early age predicts a shorter lifespan for her future offspring. This intergenerational effect of early maternal loss on offspring survival has wider implications for psychology and microevolutionary life history. In the third plenary session, Thomas Gillespie (Emory U) spoke on “A One Health Approach to Understanding and Mitigating Pathogenic Threats to Wild Primates.” He gave a passionate and thorough overview of how contact between humans, domesticated animals, and wild primates impacts bacterial similarity, disease transmission, and antibiotic resistance. The spread of agriculture and cattle herding to primate habitats due to climate change adds further complexity to these issues and necessitates collaboration with international health, conservation, and government entities. The COVID-19 pandemic has also underscored the importance of protecting wild primates from human visitors with distancing and appropriate PPE: primates that had contact with humans via ecotourism had increased risk of disease transmission compared to primates that had contact with researchers and primates that had little to no human contact. In the keynote address, Anne Savage (Proyecto Titi, Inc.) recounted her lifelong work creating the Proyecto Tití and their successful efforts to protect Cotton-top Tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) in Colombia. Their community engagement efforts, including outreach and cultural education programs as well as women's empowerment initiatives have significantly increased local knowledge of the tamarins and reduced the desire to have these “funky monkeys” as pets. Savage and her collaborators worked to understand the many challenges facing tamarin conservation in this area and promoted in-country initiatives to take a multipronged approach. Plastic waste posed an environmental threat in areas in which tamarins live, so Savage worked with local artisans to use the plastic waste as crochet material for hand-made goods. These women grew their business from a cottage industry and now engage in international conservation efforts and have their work featured on Colombian runways. To discourage families from taking young tamarins as pets, Proyecto Tití launched several programs, including the Amiguau “Dogs are Friends” program, where children learn to care for and train dogs, and a national festival featuring a wild tamarin mascot to promote national pride in the species. This project demonstrates that conservation success depends on community engagement at all levels and massively benefits from the initiatives of local communities. Speakers at the three symposia provided summary presentations from (1) Pioneers in Primatology, to (2) Managing Macaque Social Groups, and (3) Primate Conservation Education Programs (PCEP). During the Pioneers in Primatology symposium, four pioneers in primatology—Nancy Caine (CSU San Marcos), John Capitanio (UC Davis), Dorothy Fragaszy (U Georgia), and Toni Zeigler (U Wisconsin)—discussed their research and careers. Caine advised investigators to be modest, embrace the primatological community as a source of support, and broaden mentorship beyond just PhD Received: 13 December 2021 Accepted: 21 December 2021