How do primates use their curiosity in an urban landscape? Insights from The Urban Vervet Project

In the urban vervet project, which received a three-year grant from Kone Foundation, Dr. Sofia Forss and her team aim to better understand the causes and consequences for primates adapting to anthropogenic changes.

As urbanisation expands into natural habitats, animals increasingly encounter environments shaped by human influence. This raises intriguing questions about how animals like vervet monkeys adapt and behave in these semi-urban landscapes. Funded by the Kone Foundation, Finland Dr. Sofia Forss started the Urban Vervet Project (UVP) which explores these dynamics within the Simbithi Eco Estate in Ballito in South Africa. The project focus on how vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) use resources, avoid dangers, and adjust to human altered environments.

Why Vervet Monkeys?

Vervet monkeys are highly adaptable and known for their flexible behaviour and opportunistic diet, such traits allow them to thrive in rapidly changing, human-altered environments like residential and agricultural areas. They frequently make use of human food sources, which has led to a rise in interactions with people as urbanisation spreads. This intensified contact can lead to challenges for both monkeys and humans, making them an ideal species for studying both the underlying cognitive abilities responsible for their successful adaptation as well as human-wildlife dynamics in anthropogenic landscapes.

Vervet Monkey Curiosity: key findings

The KONE foundation sponsored project’s central aim was to study curiosity in vervet monkeys. In a study recently published in Current Zoology, Forss and her team of researchers investigated how vervet monkeys from wild, semi-urban, and captive environments respond to unfamiliar objects. These fresh findings reveal that captive vervet monkeys show the highest curiosity levels, exploring new items more readily than their wild and urban counterparts. Interestingly, however, urban monkeys displayed selective interest in human-associated objects, especially those that might be associated with food or food packaging. This behaviour suggests that while urban vervet monkeys may not be intrinsically more curious, they have learned to become selective by directing their exploration towards potential high-reward items, such as human food related ones. The attraction to human-related items is likely due to their experiences in anthropogenic environments and referred to as “anthrophilia” (Ellington et al., 2024).

Understanding Behaviour through multiple Research Methods

The UVP work at Simbithi focuses on three distinct monkey troops composed of 20-40 individuals each: Acacia, Savanna, and Pink. Researchers follow these human-habituated groups daily, using a range of methods, including observational studies (focal follows and scan), carefully designed experiments, and GPS tracking to understand their spatial use.

Moreover, citizen scientists—local residents—contribute valuable “on-the-ground” data by sharing location pins and observations in real time whenever they encounter troops around the estate, including instances of monkeys entering residents’ houses or feeding on human food. This approach allows researchers to explore what draws monkeys to certain areas and what deters them from others, with the goal of providing practical advice to help reduce human-wildlife conflicts in the estate and across South Africa.

Beyond Curiosity: New Frontiers at UVP

Building on these findings, UVP has broadened its focus to examine additional research questions targeting cognitive capacities of these opportunistic primates. We are now trying to understand how vervet monkeys perceive threats, such as domestic dogs and further by using field experiments on problem-solving skills we are uncovering the individual variation in behavioural flexibility and innovation tendencies to better understand how they use their cognitive abilities in this evolutionary novel habitat.

Through these studies, and with the continued support from the Kone Foundation, UVP aims to build a better understanding of how vervet monkeys adjust to life alongside humans and to share insights that foster better human-wildlife coexistence in semi-urban spaces.

Find out more by visiting the project website: https://urbanvervetproject.weebly.com/