Wild animals, including our closest relatives, chimpanzees, can live long and complex social lives. How do we categorize the types of social interactions they have, and monitor how these form, persist, and change over a lifetime, or when catastrophe strikes? Rachna will discuss methods traditionally employed to answer these questions and will present a case study in her own research on adolescent chimpanzees who lost their mothers during a respiratory epidemic and began to care for their younger siblings (pictured below). The group will discuss the issues of attempting to infer the thoughts of a member of another species with whom we cannot speak and how we can do so with awareness of our observational biases in field conditions. In addition to the behavioral methods Rachna employs, she will discuss how genetic and hormonal data are used to answer questions about social relationships in wild animals.