Market Days and Infants

While we are here, researchers usually have access to internet once a week. The market day in the local town of Nkoranza is held every Tuesday. On this day, us BFMS researchers take the tro-tro (a small minibus that is meant for 9-10 people but which is usually jammed with 20 people and their luggage) and head down to the market where we buy our groceries for the week, check the post for any mail or ‘care packages’ and use the internet. While we are living here, Tuesday market days quickly become a huge event! I look forward to market days like I anticipate Christmas mornings. So you can imagine how disappointed I was last week, when I woke up on Tuesday morning to find that it was raining heavily and that the electricity was off. This meant that Teresa and I had to wait until the rain stopped before taking a tro-tro to Nkoranza. Getting to town after it’s been raining is much more difficult, as the unpaved roads became like mud pits from the rain. In previous years, I have been in situations where all of the passengers have had to get out in knee-high mud to push the back of the tro-tro, in order to continue our journey! I find stuff like this kind of fun actually so I am describing this more with a sense of pleasure rather than complaint. Last week however, we made it to market without having to get out and push the tro-tro. We got our shopping done and Teresa bought a bicycle that she needs in order to conduct her own research project, but the electricity was still absent (it remained off for several days), which meant that internet and checking e-mail was not possible until next Tuesday market day... Boooo.
As for my actual work, I’m still in the midst of remembering individual monkey Ids and figuring out the infant situation and new group compositions in my potential study groups. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this already but ursine colobus monkey infants are born completely white; this is their natal coat. As they age, over approximately 6 months, their natal coat is slowly replaced with various degrees of grey, until they gain their adult pelage (black and white). Like in human children, although there is some individual variation around how quickly infants develop, coat colour changes over time seem to be generally similar among different infants. This is how it’s possible to estimate specific ages of ursine colobus infants. Like 99% of human babies, ursine colobus infants have ‘too-big-for-their-body’ heads (many people describe new infants as resembling aliens) but they’re adorable even when they are in the midst of changing from white to grey. During this transition, the area right around their eyes and their mouth darken first so they look like they have been fist punched in the face right in the eyes and mouth.
In group Dadie there is 1 (or possibly 2) black-and-white infants and 1 grey, group Wawa has 1 grey and 3 older black and white infants, group B2 has 2 brand-spankin’ new white (!!) and 1 older black-and-white infants, groups Red Tail and Splinter only have infants older than 6 months, and according to Teresa, Odum (a group who’s individuals I still have to learn) has 1 white-ish infants. The most important groups of all for me right now are B2 and Odum, because they have new infants and these are the only two groups in which we know for sure that there are immigrant females. This makes it possible for me document allomothering behaviour of females who aren’t related to any of the others, to see if kinship affects maternal tolerance to allomothering and if unrelated infants are less attractive for allomothering. I’m not discouraged by the fact that the majority of groups don’t have new infants. I will be here for 6 months so it is better for my project that the births are spaced out a bit so that I am always collecting data. Also, I’m not too confident in my data collection skills yet, so I will need some more practice before any of my collected data will be good enough to use. I did collect my first bit of data yesterday; an inter-group encounter between Splinter and Bomosua, a group I don’t usually watch. Inter-group encounters occur when two groups meet, usually on the boundary of each other’s range. They will contest over resources or the common space between one another’s ranges. Inter-group encounters can be aggressive, but they are usually more subtle and not outwardly aggressive. Individuals will ‘stiff-leg’ threat and ‘open-mouth’ threat at each other, but there usually isn’t a lot of contact fighting. To see who wins an inter-group encounter you wait and see which of the two groups moves off first, while the winning group remains in the common boundary space. In the inter-group encounter I documented, Splinter moved off first so they lost the “fight”. This makes me sad because Splinter has always been a winner during inter-groups, but with the murder of former alpha male Ed who was the primary participant in most inter-groups, Splinter’s power is diminishing. Or maybe the new male needs some time to establish himself as a confident and powerful leader...in case of actual aggression during an inter-group encounter he might need the support of the Splinter females and sub-adult males. I think that in time he will gain their trust and support.
The new male in Splinter has now been named Wolverine. I came up with the name, but I was keeping Teresa’s specifications for the kind of name we need in mind. Other names I proposed were Diablo, Satan, and Cocky, but Teresa didn’t think any of those fit. You see, Wolverine has some really nice big tufts, making him look like he has massive horns on his head. He also has unusually large testicles. Teresa thinks he is a hot monkey; she’s said this repeatedly and with quite some intensity. Under normal circumstances this would make things a little awkward... it’s kind of weird to get turned on by a male of a different species no matter how big his tufts or testicles are. Here however, the lack of available human males may just be getting to us ... I sometimes find myself describing male colobus as attractive and handsome also. LOL It doesn’t help that alpha males (including Wolverine) are constantly walking around with erections and trying to mount the females in their groups. haha
I also have the privilege of naming the new infants in my study groups! Wahoo. With naming infants, we’ve adopted Jane Goodall’s naming system for the chimps at Gombe. The first letter of the mother’s name will be the first letter of her infants’ names also. This way, the individuals in each colobus matriline will begin with the same letter of the alphabet. This system makes sense since ursine colobus at BFMS are generally female philopatric (females remain within the group in which they were born, while males disperse when they reach sexual maturity). Sometimes females do disperse, but under more special circumstances. I’ve thought about names for the infants in B2 ... they have to start with the letters G, O, and R. I am also including a theme to go along with these letters, to make it easier to figure out which cohort these infants belong to as they mature and grow into juveniles. The theme is spiritual and political leaders, and the infant names I thought of are Obama, Ghandi, and Remus (one of the founders of ancient Rome). I’m not sure if we will keep these names but I like them, especially Obama. Hey, he`s kind of an ok guy. Obama deserves to have one of the BFMS colobus monkeys named after him! hehe