MacaqueNet Symposia

After the success of the first "Weaving the MacaqueNet" symposium in November 2021, we hosted the 2nd symposium "Weaving the MacaqueNet 2,0" as a workshop at IPS (International Primate Society) in Kuching, Malaysia on Monday 21st August 2023, both in-person and via Zoom. During the workshop, we updated everyone on the progress we had made since our last virtual symposium, launched the MacaqueNet database, and discussed future directions and the expansion of the database. For MacaqueNet collaborators who attended IPS in person, this was the first time the MacaqueNet cohort were able to meet face-to-face, which was really exciting! It was perfectly fitting that our first in-person meeting was in a macaque-range country. As the symposia was in Borneo, we wanted to provide a platform specifically for researchers who research Malaysian macaque species as well as early-career macaque researchers. We heard from 5 researchers in a series of lightning talks, where they introduced themselves and their work. All 5 presenters lived in macaque-range countries, studied Malaysian macaque species and/or were early-career researchers. Following the IPS workshop, on Aug 23rd 2023, we held MacaqueNet’s 2nd board meeting for data contributors, where we mainly discussed the database, GitHub and data requests. It was great to bring the community together to share new ideas in-person as well as online. The full "Weaving the MacaqueNet 2.0" workshop programme can still be viewed here.

In Nov 2021 we successfully hosted our first ever MacaqueNet conference. This 3-day symposium provided an opportunity for all the current data contributors to meet, discuss their research and learn about ongoing projects. Together, we discussed the future directions of MacaqueNet as well as the current state and future avenues of macaque social behaviour research as a whole. This event was a major milestone for MacaqueNet and marked the maturation of MacaqueNet from a mere concept to it becoming a international network of like-minded macaque researchers. While it has been amazing to see the database grow with behavioural data from all over the world, witnessing so many experts in macaque research come together, willing and open to collaborate and share resources in the name of "big team" science has been truly breathtaking and exceeded all expectations.