Meet our grantees
Wild Animal Initiative funds academic research on high-priority questions in wild animal welfare.
The goal of our grants program is to fund research that deepens scientific knowledge of the welfare of wild animals in order to better understand how to improve the welfare of as many wild animals as possible, regardless of what causes the threats to their well-being.
We showcase our grantees and their projects here and continuously update this page as new projects are added.
Validating body posture as a novel marker of well-being in animals
Grantee: Nicola Koyama
Institution: Liverpool John Moores University
Project summary
A few studies on nonhuman primates have found that a hunched posture is a response to social separation and physical inflammation, but research linking whole body posture and physiological measures of welfare is lacking. This project will combine established measures of affective valence (nasal temperature) and arousal (iris-pupil ratio) to validate body posture as a new measure of affective valence. Two months of video data will be collected and used for thermal imaging, behavioral, and postural analysis from groups of wild Barbary macaques, along with pilot data for comparison from non-human primate zoo animals. Ultimately, the project aims to share a new validated measure and conceptual framework that can be applied to a range of wild mammals.
Paying to play? Social time allocation, emotional contagion, and social attention as assays of welfare in wild animals
Grantee: Patrick Tkaczynski
Institution: Liverpool John Moores University
Project summary
Play and grooming have a number of facets that could be potential indicators of positive welfare in group-living vertebrates, but analysis of such behaviors are yet to be put into a formal framework for monitoring wild animal populations. This pilot project will focus on six different wild Barbary macaque groups of variable sizes and facing varying degrees of human exposure, which is typically associated with poor health outcomes in wild animals. It will use play and grooming behavior to quantify social time allocation, emotional contagion/synchronization, and social attention as potential assays of positive welfare. Once validated, these assays can be applied to examine how positive welfare varies across different gradients, such as climate change or variation in predator pressure.