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Glucocorticoids (GCs) are hormones released in response to stressors and can provide insight into an organism's physiological well‐being. Experiencing chronic challenges to homeostasis is associated with significant deviations from baseline fecal GCs (fGCs) in many species, providing a noninvasive biomarker for assessing stress. In the group of free‐ranging Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) at the Awajishima Monkey Center in Japan, ~17% have congenital limb malformations. We collected 646 fecal samples from 27 females over three consecutive birth seasons (May–August) and analyzed them using enzyme immunoassay to extract fGCs. We explored the relationship between fGC levels and individual (physical impairment and reproductive status), social (dominance rank and availability of kin for social support), and ecological variables (exposure to potential predators, rainfall, and wild fruit availability). A disabled infant was associated significantly with higher fGC in the mother; however, physical impairment in adult females was not significantly related to fGC levels. Females with higher dominance rank had significantly lower fGC levels than lower ranking females. Other factors did not relate significantly to fGC. These results suggest that providing care that meets the support needs of disabled infants poses a physiological challenge for mothers and suggests that physically impaired adults are able to effectively compensate for their disabilities with behavioral plasticity. Once an individual with congenital limb malformations survives infancy through their mother's care, physical impairment does not appear to influence fGC values, while social variables like dominance rank significantly influenced cortisol values in free‐ranging female Japanese macaques.

When animals forage, they face complex multi-destination routing problems. Traplining behaviour—the repeated use of the same route—can be used to study how spatial memory might evolve to cope with complex routing problems in ecologically distinct taxa. We analyzed experimental data from multi-destination foraging arrays for five species, two cercopithecine monkeys (vervets, Chlorocebus pygerythrus, and Japanese macaques, Macaca fuscata) and three strepsirrhines (fat-tailed dwarf lemurs, Cheirogaleus medius, grey mouse lemurs, Microcebus murinus, and aye-ayes, Daubentonia madagascariensis). These species all developed relatively efficient route formations within the arrays but appeared to rely on variable cognitive mechanisms. We found a strong reliance on heuristics in cercopithecoid species, with initial routes that began near optimal and did not improve with experience. In strepsirrhines, we found greater support for reinforcement learning of location-based decisions, such that routes improved with experience. Further, we found evidence of repeated sequences of site visitation in all species, supporting previous suggestions that primates form traplines. However, the recursive use of routes was weak, differing from the strategies seen in well-known traplining animals. Differences between strepsirrhine and cercopithecine strategies may be the result of either ecological or phylogenetic trends, and we discuss future possibilities for disentangling the two.

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