Making use of capuchins’ behavioral propensities to obtain hair samples for DNA analyses

Authors

  • Elisabetta Visalberghi Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Rome, Italy
  • Serena Cavallero Dipartimento di Sanità Pubblica e Malattie Infettive, Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy
  • Dorothy M. Fragaszy Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, USA
  • Patricia Izar Department of Experimental Psychology, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
  • Rodrigo Mendes Aguiar Department of Experimental Psychology, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
  • Valentina Truppa Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Rome, Italy

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.62015/np.2015.v22.141

Keywords:

Hair collection, DNA, non-invasive method, Sapajus

Abstract

Genotyping wild and captive capuchins has become a priority and hair bulbs have high quality DNA. Here, we describe a method to non-invasively collect fresh-plucked strands of hair that exploits capuchins’ manual dexterity and propensity to grasp and extract food. The apparatus consists of a transparent tube baited with food. Its extraction requires the monkey to place its forearm in contact with double-sided tape applied on the inner surface of the tube entrance. The “tube” method, successfully implemented with captive (N=23) and wild (N=21) capuchins, allowed us to obtain hair bulbs from most indi- viduals and usable genomic DNA was extracted even from a single bulb.

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Published

2015-12-01

Issue

Vol. 22 No. 2 (2015)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Visalberghi, E., Cavallero, S., Fragaszy, D. M., Izar, P., Aguiar, R. M., & Truppa, V. (2015). Making use of capuchins’ behavioral propensities to obtain hair samples for DNA analyses. Neotropical Primates, 22(2), 89-93. https://doi.org/10.62015/np.2015.v22.141