Effects of space and time on capuchin monkey foraging decisions

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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.