Unlocking Woolly Monkey Mysteries Could Teach Us More About Humans

A close encounter with monkeys in Colombia’s forests as a biology student, eventually led biological anthropologist Laura Abondano to study woolly monkeys, which have some behaviors completely different from more-studied monkey species.

Abondano, now a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, says the lowland woolly monkeys (Lagothrix lagotricha poeppigii) that she mainly studies, have fascinating behaviors that deviate from many other primates.

“For example, among woolly monkeys, females are the ones that solicit males for copulations (sex), and they actively compete with each other to mate with males, while males do not really engage in fights with each other to mate with females,” she says, “Instead they seem to be more tolerant with one another even during mating contexts.”

Abondano says when you have an understudied branch of species (taxa) like woolly monkeys that doesn’t receive as much attention as other primate species like chimpanzees, macaques, baboons, capuchins or even spider monkeys, it is hard to develop a strong theoretical background because there aren’t a large number of strong previous studies to draw on.

“This often results in generalizing behaviors for the entire primate order based on only a few species,” she says, “This is why it is imperative that understudied taxa receive more attention —and funding!— given that they can provide important insights about the variation in reproductive behaviors among primates, including humans.”

A Close Encounter

Abondano grew up in Bogota, Colombia and as a child loved to go camping and being outdoors and during an ecology course field trip to Serrania de Las Quinchas, a natural reserve in the Colombia’s Magdalena Middle River Valley, she had her first close encounter with wild, nonhuman primates.

She was following a female spider monkey who was moving ahead of her one-year old daughter, but her daughter seemed hesitant to leap between the trees like her mother did. The mother then went back, grabbed branches from both trees with her hands, feet, and prehensile tail, extending her body to make a “bridge” and the little one walked over her mother’s back.

“At this moment I felt close familiarity with the behavior I was observing and perhaps that was the eureka moment that convinced me of pursuing a career in primatology, and in understanding our own human behaviors from a comparative perspective with nonhuman primate behaviors,” Abondano says.

Monkey Mysteries

Abondano says that despite spider and woolly monkeys being in the same taxonomic family, and spider monkeys being her “first love” as a primatologist, she noticed that in the scientific literature there were plenty of articles written about the behavior, ecology, reproduction, genetics, etc., of spider monkeys but very little research devoted to woolly monkeys.

“This lack of information encouraged me to conduct my doctoral dissertation research with woolly monkeys, in particular in understanding reproductive strategies using a behavioral, genetic, and endocrinological approach to identify whether females were mating preferentially with specific males during periods of high fertility,” she says, adding that like menstruating humans, woolly monkeys have ovarian cycles with days of high fertility (when they are ovulating) and periods when the chances of becoming pregnant are lower.

Abondano says that working with wild woolly monkeys, and in particular their reproductive behaviors, has been particularly challenging because female woolly monkeys only reproduce approximately every three years, and it takes six to eight years for females to have their first offspring.

“It’s necessary to conduct long term behavioral studies (in combination with genetic and endocrine analyses) to really understand their reproductive strategies,” she says, adding this makes funding more challenging to find.

Another Global South scientist working with forests and monkeys is Samuel Oluwanisola Adeyanju.

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