I recently gave a talk on my current project on chimpanzee play behaviour for the Primate Conversations Seminar Series, here in Oxford. As talks are now virtual, you can watch the talk here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vaOgtiFpFc

Every year on 14th July, we celebrate World Chimpanzee Day to commemorate the day that Jane Goodall first followed the Gombe chimpanzees, but more importantly we want to raise awareness for the horrible fact that chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, face extinction in the wild across Africa. This year, our lab in Oxford (https://primobevolab.web.ox.ac.uk/) teamed up with a group from the University of Exeter and the Bulindi Chimpanzee & Community Project to create a series of videos that are supposed to inform a general public about chimpanzees and the many wonderful people who study them.

Now that everyone is talking about keeping association between people as small as possible, it feels good to talk about association in our sooty mangabeys, and our new paper in ‘Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology’ (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265-020-2829-y ). Mangabey groups are fairly large; in 2014-2017, the time of this study, our group consisted of 50-70 individuals, give or take. The group moves through the forest as a whole, so usually we all end up in the same place; but that does not mean that you can see everyone all the time: the forest is dense, and the group is spread out, so while the group does not get torn into clear smaller groups, they are stretched out over a large area.