The release of captive animals into the wild is a complex theme and advances in its knowledge is very relevant for environment agencies. The majority of the release projects fail to assess their outcomes and most of the projects assessed have survival rates below 50%, failing to establish a self-sustained population into the wild. Generally, monitored projects base their measurement of success in short-term survival rates. Besides the difficulty of obtaining confirmed deaths, especially for small groups, only survivorship do not tell much about the program success. Individuals’ pattern of habitat use (substrata used, area occupied and food consumed) can be used as short-term fine grained index of release success.

In this project, we aim to answer the following questions:

1.Does behaviour prior to release correlates to behaviour after release?

2.How long will animals remains dependent on food offered by humans (see methodology below)

3.How long will it take to animals to reach the area of a nearby group (about 5 km apart)

4.Will animals remain a stable group?

Answering these questions by studying non-endangered capuchin species will provide evidences that may help support future wildlife reintroduction decisions. For example, the reintroduction of endangered blond and yellow breasted capuchins (S. flavius and S. xanthosternus) is planned to start in 2016 as a national conservation action to establish new populations (link: http://www.icmbio. gov.br/portal/biodiversidade/fauna-brasileira/plano-de-acao/865-pan-primatas-do-nordeste).

As a result of my research, we expect to be able to indicate instructions and selection criteria for future projects, as well as, identify effective, low-budget strategies for post-release monitoring. The data collected during this project will help clarify some theoretical discussions on the validity of release programs.