Blog

Jul 19

Busy Conference Summer 2024

The students of the Urban Vervet Project have had a productive Summer presenting our latest results on primate adaptations to anthropogenic environments at both the European Federation for Primatology’s conference in Lausanne in June 2024 and here at our home institution at the University of Zurich at the European Conference... read more →
Jul 02

Joining the DISI 2024 Faculty in St. Andrews

I had the great pleasure and honour to become one of the Faculty Members of the Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute 2024. For this I spent a solid week interacting with a global network of students and thinkers united in our interest in understanding intelligence in all it forms, cross systems.... read more →
Jun 03

New findings from the Urban Vervet Project

I am very proud of Lindsey Ellington, the UVP's first MSc student for publishing her study comparing object curiosity across three different habitats; captive, urban and wild. We find that monkeys in an anthropogenic environment are more similar to wild counterparts in their exploration tendencies than to captive peers. Read... read more →
Apr 23

Receiver of the 2024 Academic Excellence Award (UZH)

I am extremely honoured to have been awarded the Academic Excellence Award by the FAN (Fond für Akademische Nachwuchs) at the University of Zurich. With this generous financial support I will be able to grow my newly launched Urban Vervet Project and investigate many interesting questions on how primate behaviour... read more →
Feb 22
Nov 29

New Publication on Animal Curiosity

Curiosity is an intrinsic motivation necessary for animals to acquire new information. One way to examine information seeking in animals, has been to present animals with novel objects and measure the way animals gather information through their explorative behaviors. In this study we assessed explorative behaviors in wild meerkats (Suricata... read more →
Nov 23
Oct 30

UVP celebrates 1 year! 

End of October we celebrated the first Birthday of the Urban Vervet Project by giving a public talk on our project progress at the Simbithi estate and a very nice local brai at one of the community centers. We were joined by some of our most faithful monkey lovers amongst... read more →
Oct 29
Arte filming Simbithi

Arte Filming the UVP

During this Field visit at Simbithi, I had the pleasure to host ARTE film crew, where the Urban Vervet Project will be featured. We absolutely enjoyed seeing our monkeys through the creative minds of Hevre and Alexandra.
Oct 25

Fieldtrip to the vervets of Simbithi 

After my time in Kalahari, I traveled across South Africa to my other study site, the Urban Vervet Project. Spending two amazing weeks with the current ground team of Stef, Paige, Adrian & Joey. We moved forward with heaps of field experiments, new data protocols, and lots of fun observations... read more →