Cayo Santiago Field Station

Abstract

The Cayo Santiago Field Station, home to a provisioned colony of free‐ranging rhesus macaques ( Macaca mulatta ), is a world‐renowned field site for the study of nonhuman primate behavior. The population of Cayo Santiago offers a unique resource for long‐term studies of rhesus macaques in a naturalistic setting on topics such as behavior, ecology, demography, life history, and genetics. The constant surveillance of the population since 1956 and the detailed knowledge of DNA profiles of the monkeys since the 1990s have served to improve our understanding of primate behavior and to ultimately link behavior to its underlying biology.