Effects of space and time on capuchin monkey foraging decisions

空间和时间对卷尾猴觅食决策的影响

• 批准号: 9870909
• 负责人: Charles Janson
• 金额: $ 17.5万
• 依托单位: SUNY at Stony Brook
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1998
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1998-09-01 至 2001-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9870909&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Effects; space; time; capuchin; monkey

Despite much study on animal foraging behavior, very little is known about how animals make decisions about how to travel to and visit discrete, renewing food patches (such as nectar in flowers or fruit in trees). Answering these questions is of interest to human geography (the problem is very much like the famous 'traveling salesman problem'), conservation and habitat management (the effectiveness of animals as pollinators and seed dispersers depends strongly on their movement patterns), and to those interested in the evolution of social behavior (how individuals forage in groups determines the degree of food competition, which can act as a primary limit on group size). This proposal extends previous field experiments on capuchin monkeys, in which I studied their movements through an array of equally-valuable food sites, made of wooden platforms provisioned with fruit. The monkeys seem to use a simple rule to decide where to move next: 'Go to the nearest unused resource that lies ahead of you'. The specific goals of this study are to validate this rule using another study group and to learn what rules these monkeys use in more general and natural choices, including those between richer versus closer feeding sites and between more clustered versus more isolated feeding sites.

尽管有很多关于动物觅食行为的研究，但很少有人知道动物如何决定如何前往和访问离散的、更新的食物斑块（如花朵中的花蜜或树上的果实）。 探讨这些问题是人文地理学的一个重要课题（这个问题很像著名的'旅行推销员问题'），保护和栖息地管理（动物作为授粉者和种子传播者的有效性在很大程度上取决于它们的运动模式），以及对社会行为进化感兴趣的人（个体如何在群体中觅食决定了食物竞争的程度，这可以作为群体大小的主要限制）。 这个提议扩展了之前对卷尾猴的野外实验，在那个实验中，我研究了它们通过一系列同样有价值的食物点的运动，这些食物点是由提供水果的木制平台制成的。 猴子们似乎用一个简单的规则来决定下一步的行动：“去你前面最近的未使用的资源。”本研究的具体目标是使用另一个研究小组来验证这一规则，并了解这些猴子在更普遍和自然的选择中使用什么规则，包括在更丰富与更接近的喂食点之间以及在更密集与更孤立的喂食点之间的选择。