The German Primate Center – planning and realization of the institute

It took almost 20 years from the first proposal for the foundation of a German primate centre to the final establishment of an institute for research on primates. Since 1964, the German science community had considered the idea of founding a national primate centre in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) following existing models in the USA. In 1967, the project received a significant boost from the outbreak of the lethal Marburg virus infections, which was transmitted from African green monkeys to humans. However, a memorandum from Hans-Jürg Kuhn, at that time at the University of Frankfurt, facilitated a breakthrough in 1970. He conceived an interdisciplinary institute that would both conduct its own scientific research and be a service institute for other German institutions. After highly charged debates on a suitable location, the federal government decided on Göttingen, and in 1972 the University of Göttingen provided the necessary ground. With the certificate of incorporation in 1977, the federal government and the German state Lower Saxony appointed Professor Kuhn as the first scientific director. Based on his memorandum, a research and service institute was developed with several scientific departments associated with primate husbandry, and full operation began in 1984

Environmental change and housing conditions result in disappearance and return of reproductive seasonality in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)

Rhesus macaques in their natural environments, as well as in the free-ranging colonyat Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico are highly seasonal breeders. Many ani-mal species lose breeding seasonality when brought under captive conditions. The present study that cov-ers aperiod of 25 years between 1985 and 2010 reports a quick loss of reproductive seasonalityin Group O of rhesus macaques after the group was shifted from Cayo Santiago to German Primate Cen-tre at Gottingen, Germany in 1984, and maintained indoors with controlled temperature and day-length periods for about four years. We divided the study pe-riod of 25 years into five time-periods of five years each for analysis of the data. Over the subsequent years, births started to concentrate within only a few months indicating an increasingtrend towards return of reproductive seasonality. This increase coincided with the increasing number of births in groups with outdoor facilities. Because other factors such as food, water, etc. were similar in indoor and outdoor condi-tions, we infer that the recovery of seasonality in the outdoor groups was due to the variations in tempera-ture and photoperiod. We report here the presence of reproductive seasonality, its disappearance and return in the same colony and its descendents