Cayo Santiago

NEW! Cayo Santiago Video (85MB). The video will take about 5 minutes to download complete with 56k modem.

Cayo Santiago Field Station is a beautiful 15.2 ha (38 acre) island located 1 km off the southeastern coast of Puerto Rico. Cayo Santiago is a unique free-ranging island monkey colony of rhesus monkeys, which is used primarily for behavior, demography, genetic, and physiology as well as noninvasive data collection on types of biomedical research. Skeletons from Cayo Santiago monkeys are maintained at the Laboratory for Primate Morphology and Genetics (LPMG). The CPRC's collection of fixed soft tissue specimens, Cayo Santiago Herbarium, library and centralized computerized database are also housed in the LPMG.

The Cayo Santiago rhesus monkey colony was founded in 1938. The colony was established to provide a field site for behavioral investigations and to supply rhesus monkeys for biomedical research and anatomical studies at stateside laboratories. When the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Laboratory of Perinatal Physiology (LPP) was opened in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1956, Cayo Santiago became the Primate Ecology Section of the Laboratory of Perinatal Physiology, and the daily census and longitudinal demographic database began in 1957.

This web site is supported by the 5P40RR003640 grant from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and by the Research Centers in Minority Institutions Grant (G12 RR03051) from the National Center for Research Resources, National Institutes of Health.