Overview

So here's a quick description of what I'll be doing down in Argentina, since people keep asking. The researcher, Annie Green, summarizes her research like this:

Overview
This proposal studies the fitness consequences of individual color vision
variation in wild Cebus apella at Iguazú Falls, Argentina to discriminate between alternative
mechanisms that maintain allelic variation in color vision genes in platyrrhine populations. This
study will expand on the few existing studies of food detections in wild monkeys by using a
statistically more powerful paired-comparison sampling design, comparing multiple groups of
differing composition, and using sensitive objective measures of the color and lighting contexts
associated with contexts of sampled observations.

Intellectual Merit
Knowledge on how variation is maintained in natural populations is essential to evolutionary
ecology and to understanding the evolution of adaptive traits. The color vision polymorphism in
New World primates provides a unique opportunity to investigate this problem. Previous work
has demonstrated that color vision affects behavioral response, but the connection to natural
fitness consequences remains ambiguous. The proposed research will expand upon previous
work by collecting appropriate measurements on the ecological context and consequences of
potential fitness influencing behaviors such as foraging and vigilance exhibited by different
visual phenotypes in multiple social groups. Consequently, this study could have important
implications for understanding the high frequency of dichromacy found in human, Caucasian
males, and may shed light on maintenance of the large number of L-opsin alleles in human
females.

Broader Impacts
This study will generate new data, including behavioral, nutritional, spectral, and DNA data,
which will be made available to the primate and color vision research communities. The project
will provide employment and training for members of the local Guaraní community and
undergraduate women of both Argentina and the United States. Additionally, this work will
compliment Charles Janson’s on-going research on predator detection (NSF BCS 0515007).
Finally, the provocative nature of this subject provides immense potential for public outreach
and education.

Behavioral sampling
Pairs of observers will follow groups from dawn to dusk for 3-25 consecutive days. Activities of paired individuals will be recorded during synchronized 15s continuous focal samples taken at 1-min intervals. This paired sampling design will be provide greater power in determining differences between color vision variants. By controlling for
habitat, time of day, and group activity contexts during the sampling process, any differences in
foraging success or behaviors between visual phenotypes should be much more salient than
would be the case when individuals of different visual phenotypes are compared across these
important sources of variation.

Translation: I go out into the jungle and observe a family of Capuchin monkeys and take notes on their foraging, eating, grooming, etc. And then compare those observations to their known DNA which tells us what kind of vision they have (two or three cones) and do some statistical analyzes on that. That's about as much as I can understand haha. I"ll update this more when I get down there!