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Info DEE # 27 - May 2021
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WELCOME TO OUR NEW COLLEAGUES
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Ms Alba Montes Rodrigo joined the groupe of Prof. Laurent Keller as Postdoctoral fellow. Alba is located in office 3217, phone 41.81. Alba.MotesRodrigo@unil.ch
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Mr Petros Raitsidis has joined the DEE as a Multimedia Technician and IT Support. He will be responsible for web, newsletter and seminar communications as well as IT equipment orders. Petros is located in office 3105, phone 41.79 Petros.Raitsidis@unil.ch
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Erica van de Waal was interviewed by Le Temps where she explains how she met her calling to study behavior of wild vervet monkeys in South Africa. Read more (French)
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This year again, biologists from UNIL, Roulin's group, will be regularly present in the gardens of the Château de Vullierens to propose animations about Barn Owls. These special days will complement the small exhibition permanently present on the site. Learn more
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The group has also launched a website for the general public in French, German and English with numerous explanations on current research and live data on the studied bird populations.
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Dr Charlotte Canteloup and Prof. Erica van de Waal published with colleagues of the Mawana Game Reserve and the Max Planck institute, an article entitled Processing of novel food reveals payoff and rank-biased social learning in a wild primate in Scientific Reports showing how Vervet socially adopt the most efficient food processing technique and used by dominant individuals. This article reveals how a novel feeding habit spread in groups of wild monkeys. Dr. Charlotte Canteloup, associate postdoctoral researcher in the team of Erica van de Waal, offered an unknown food – unshelled peanuts – to two groups of wild vervet monkeys in South Africa. Do monkeys learn from others how to extract peanuts from their shells? The researchers described three different peanut opening techniques displayed by the monkeys. The authors report in their publication that monkeys socially learned the technique providing them with the greatest observed payoff (corresponding to the observed average probability that a technique succeeds, a probability that is specific to the observation experience of each individual), and that individuals had a biased attention towards higher ranker individuals and preferentially learned from them. Such social learning strategies - adopting the most effective technique used by others, and especially by individuals of higher social rank, could be at the origin of behavioral traditions such as some feeding habits.
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Picture of the experiment illustrating vervet monkeys eating peanuts around the container. Picture credit: Jose van der Geest.
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