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Lookup NU author(s): David Massey, Dr Claire WithamORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Fight injuries are a major welfare concern in group-housed rhesus macaques. This is particularly a problem in breeding groups. We investigated which factors might affect the injury rate in group-housed macaques and also looked at how the same factors might affect productivity. We analysed 10 years of health records at a breeding colony in which monkeys were kept in small breeding groups consisting of a single adult male and 2–13 females and their offspring or single-sex juvenile groups. We found that females over the age of 2.5 years in breeding groups were the most likely to be injured. We focused on these females and used generalised mixed-effect models to examine which factors affected the injury rate and their productivity (probability of getting pregnant). The biggest risk factor for injury was the introduction of a new adult male to a breeding group. However, this also produced a large increase in the proportion of females that became pregnant, suggesting that there may be a trade-off between the risk of injury and the productivity. We also found that females in large groups with a young breeding male had a very high risk of injury. We recommend keeping young breeding males (<7 years) in smaller groups.
Author(s): Massey DA, Peters F, Willshire J, Witham CL
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Biology
Year: 2022
Volume: 11
Issue: 7
Online publication date: 28/06/2022
Acceptance date: 23/06/2022
Date deposited: 18/07/2022
ISSN (electronic): 2079-7737
Publisher: MDPI
URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/biology11070979
DOI: 10.3390/biology11070979
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