During the Edinburgh International Science Festival we hosted an exhibit entitled ‘Wild Medicine’. The display highlighted research on how animals use the natural world around them to medicate themselves and/or prevent illness.

There was a stall in town and also activities and a trail in the zoo. Lewis Anderson successfully completed the zoo trail and was entered into a prize draw to assist in giving our capuchins their preferred medicinal item – Onions!

Today Lewis joined our team in delivering ‘wild medicine’ to our monkeys! All primates involved had a great time.

To learn more about animals using natural remedies see our short video entitled ‘Monkey Medicine’

Members of the Scottish Primate Research Group from the University of St Andrews, have revealed what wild chimpanzees are trying to say when they communicate with their body and hand movements.

Dr Catherine Hobaiter and Professor Richard Byrne created a ‘dictionary’ of meanings behind chimp gestures such as arm raises, ground slaps and foot stomps by observing over 80 wild Ugandan chimpanzees.

The results have just been published in the journal Current Biology. Although it has been known for some time that apes use gestures to communicate, it wasn’t until now that we have worked out what they are actually trying to say.

Professor Byrne, explained:

“There is abundant evidence that chimpanzees and other apes gesture with purpose. Apes target their gestures to particular individuals, choosing appropriate gestures according to whether the other is looking or not; they stop gesturing when they get the result they want; and otherwise they keep going, trying out alternative gestures or other tactics altogether.’

In a significant first step towards answering this question, the researchers studied the behaviour of chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest, Uganda.  They used video to record communicative interactions, and extracted over 4500 instances of gesturing. They looked specifically at non-playful uses (because in play, gestures may not be used with their ‘real’ meaning) and identified specific meanings for most of the chimpanzee repertoire of 66 gestures.

Amongst the meanings discovered, they found that when a chimpanzee taps another it means ‘stop that’; a hand fling or slapping an object means ‘move away’; while an arm raise means ‘I want that’ or ‘give me that’.

Dr Hobaiter explained:

“Just as with human words, some gestures have several senses, but importantly the meanings of chimpanzee gestures are the same irrespective of who uses them. Chimpanzees may use more than one gesture for the same purpose – especially in social negotiations, where the final outcome may be a matter of some give and take”.

The next steps will involve the St Andrews researchers investigating possible variations in meaning behind certain chimpanzee gestures.

Dr Hobaiter added, “Now that the basic chimpanzee gesture ‘dictionary’ is known, we can start to tackle other interesting questions. Do some gestures have very general meanings, where their intended sense is understood from the context? Or do subtle variations in how a gesture is made determine which sense was meant?”

Our question at Living Links is will someone try and match this type of study for our capuchins? We do see a variety of gestures from our monkeys that are linked with social responses from the rest of the group, any SPRG members up for this challenge?

The paper, ‘The meanings of chimpanzee gestures’ is published by Current Biology on Thursday July 3. The paper is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.05.066

BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28023630

Jane Goodall DBE, who opened Living Links with Sir Michael Atiyah in 2008, revisited the Centre on 30 April 2014. We were delighted to be able to show her how Living Links has flourished in the six years since opening, with our innovative combination of research and public engagement in a zoo setting.

Researchers from the Scottish Primate Research Group who work at Living Links and the Budongo Trail were on hand to meet Dr Goodall to discuss their research and, despite overcast conditions, Dr Emily Messer was able to give a demonstration of her work on capuchin fur rubbing (see our video Monkey Medicine for more information).

Professor Andrew Whiten, Director of Living Links, said: ‘It was an enormous pleasure to welcome Jane Goodall back to Living Links. We were able to show her the progress we have made in the Centre and we were delighted to have this pioneering primatologist take her place in our “My Primate Family Tree” mural.’

Dr Goodall spent the day at the zoo and gave the first in RZSS’s ‘Tribal Elders: Words of Wisdom’ lecture series.

Our founding director of Living Links Professor Andrew Whiten from the University of St Andrews, is to be awarded the Senior Public Engagement Prize 2014 from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) for his extensive, creativity and unique forms of public engagement at the Living Links Centre and beyond.

Each year the RSE highlights some of the UK’s most outstanding talent through its Royal Medals and Prize Winner awards. The awards are given to those working at the present time, and include those who have reached the pinnacle of their discipline and are regarded as such internationally.

President of the RSE, Sir John Arbuthnott, said: ‘One of the great privileges of my role is meeting the Royal Medalists and Prize Winners. These are our highest accolades. They reflect the Enlightenment spirit of the RSE’s Royal Charter of 1783 and its remit to advance learning and useful knowledge. My warmest congratulations to all of this year’s recipients.’

To get an overview of our public engagement activities click on the link below http://www.living-links.org/visitors-2/public/.

Congratulations to St Andrews researcher Dr Erica van de Waal who has been awarded the 2014 Niko Tinbergen Award of the Ethologische Gesellschaft, the Society which organises the annual European Conference on Behavioural Biology (ECBB).

Dr van de Waal will give a plenary lecture at the ECBB meeting in July in Prague.

For the past three years, Dr van de Waal has been a research fellow studying social learning in wild African Vervet monkeys, part of an international collaboration between the Universities of Neuchatel, Zurich and St Andrews, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation(SNSF). This year, she begins her own postdoctoral fellowship in St Andrews to continue her collaboration with Professor Andrew Whiten, funded by the SNSF.

Next week we will be welcoming Camila Galheigo Coelho a PhD student from Durham University who has been studying wild capuchin behaviour.

Some of her work will be featured in the BBC2 three part documentary Wild Brazil which airs January 14 – 16th at 9pm.

She has been studying ‘Social dynamics and the diffusion of novel behaviour patterns’ in capuchin monkeys and our monkeys here will now have a chance to take part in tasks that their wild counter parts have done.