Kristin Havercamp

Kyoto University | Kyodai · Wildlife Research Center

Utilizing the Great Ape Information Network (GAIN), an open-access nationwide database containing the detailed life history information of all apes who have lived or currently reside in Japan, we present a robust chimpanzee life table by single year of age and sex including 821 individuals spanning nearly a century, current through March 11, 2019....

Social network analysis provides valuable opportunities to quantify the nature of social relationships in animal societies including aspects of group structure, dynamics and behaviour transmission. Remote monitoring approaches such as camera trapping offer rich data sets from groups and species that are difficult to observe, yet the robustness of t...

As camera trapping grows in popularity and application, some analytical limitations persist including processing time and accuracy of data annotation. Typically images are recorded by camera traps although videos are becoming increasingly collected even though they require much more time for annotation. To overcome limitations with image annotation...

Chimpanzees were used in hepatitis research for over three decades with the aim to identify and develop treatments for the virus, a leading cause of chronic liver disease in humans. We used a dataset of 120 chimpanzees housed at a single institution in Japan, 22 of whom became chronically infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV), to examine whether HC...

Nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT) has been reported for males of only a few mammalian species, including humans, albeit this scarcity might be an artefact of the difficulty of documenting it. We investigated NPT in 12 adult male chimpanzees living in an all-male group at Kumamoto Sanctuary, Japan. Recorded non-invasively with infrared video cameras...

Detailed, long-term datasets on the life histories of long-lived species such as great apes are necessary to understand their survival patterns but are relatively rare. Such information requires prolonged and consistent record-keeping over many generations, so for chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ), this equates to many decades of input. As life histo...

Diurnal primates spend around half of their lifetime sleeping or inactive. These nocturnal behaviors are considerably understudied compared to daytime activities. While it is well established that sleep quality diminishes with age in humans, little is known about the effects of advanced age on sleep in our closest primate relatives. We aimed to des...

We studied the island-wide distribution of wild Japanese macaques in Yakushima (Macaca fuscata yakui) in May 2017 and 2018. We walked 165.4 km along roads and recorded the location of 842 macaque feces. We divided the roads into segments 50 m in length (N=3308) and analyzed the effect of the areas of farms and villages or conifer plantations around...

Undernourishment and hunger are enormous global problems affecting millions of people everyday. At the same time, many people are unaware of the production of excess food leading to huge amounts of food waste. The goal of this paper is to stress the importance of creating a sustainable and secure future for food by approaching the problem from the...