DEVELOPMENT OF GOLDEN LION TAMARIN FORAGING BEHAVIOR

我们对食物和饮食的许多态度都是在童年时期养成的。因此，儿童的健康和营养状况，以及随后成人的健康和营养状况，取决于童年的喂养经历。然而，我们对食物偏好、饮食习惯和技能是如何学习的理解仍然非常初级。我们确实知道，人类婴儿在很大程度上依赖于社会手段来获取与食物有关的信息，这一点可能比任何其他哺乳动物都要大。在非人类灵长类动物中，绒猴和罗望鱼是独一无二的，因为家庭成员提供断奶的幼崽的程度与我们人类提供幼崽的程度很相似。本研究建议以金狮塔马林作为研究人类食物选择和饮食习惯发展的模型。它将重点放在罗望鱼生命的第一年中，独立试错学习和关于食物的社会学习之间的相互作用。将利用实地观察和收集，对年长群体成员给予未成熟的罗望子鱼的食物类型进行营养分析，以审查供应的功能，描述年轻人获取食物的各种方式，以及这些食物获取策略在个体发育过程中如何变化，并描述照顾者在确定年轻人食物摄入量方面的作用。旨在测量食物熟悉度对食物转移相互作用的影响的行为实验将在圈养家庭群体上进行，以进一步检查供应的功能。还将在圈养的群体中进行婴儿乞讨叫声的回放实验，以便更清楚地评估幼崽乞讨食物的成本。因此，野生动物行为的自然变异和受控的实验变异将被用来检验关于食物选择和觅食技能发展的假设。

Many of our attitudes about food and eating are developed during childhood. Thus, the health and nutritional condition of the child, and of the subsequent adult, are shaped by childhood feeding experiences. However, our understanding of how food preferences, eating habits and skills are learned is still very rudimentary. We do know that human infants rely, to a much greater extent than perhaps any other mammal, on social means to acquire food-related information. The marmosets and tamarins are unique among non-human primates in the degree to which family members provision weaned young, much as we humans provision our young. This study proposes to use the golden lion tamarin as a model for the study of the development of food selection and eating habits in humans. It will focus on the interplay between independent trial and error learning and social learning about food during the tamarins' first year of life. Field observations and collection for nutritional analysis of food types given to immature tamarins by older group members will be used to examine the functions of provisioning, to describe the various means by which young acquire food and how these food acquisition strategies change during ontogeny, and to describe the roles of caretakers in determining food intake by the young. Behavioral experiments designed to measure the effects of food familiarity on food transfer interactions will be conducted on captive family groups to further examine the functions of provisioning. Playback experiments of infant begging calls also will be conducted on groups in captivity in order to more clearly assess the costs of begging for food by the young. Thus, natural variation in the behavior of wild animals and controlled experimental variation will be used to test hypotheses regarding the development of food selection and foraging skills.