Effects of space and time on capuchin monkey foraging decisions

尽管有很多关于动物觅食行为的研究，但关于动物如何决定如何前往和访问离散的、更新的食物区(如花中的花蜜或树上的水果)，人们知之甚少。回答这些问题对人文地理学(这个问题与著名的“旅行商问题”非常相似)、保护和栖息地管理(动物作为传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)以及那些对社会行为演变感兴趣的人(个体如何在群体中觅食决定食物竞争的程度，这可能是对群体规模的主要限制)都是感兴趣的。这一提议延续了之前在卷尾猴身上进行的野外实验，在那次实验中，我通过一系列同样有价值的食物场地来研究它们的活动，这些场地是由木质平台制成的，上面放有水果。猴子们似乎用一个简单的规则来决定下一步该搬到哪里：“去离你最近的未使用的资源。”这项研究的具体目标是通过另一个研究小组来验证这一规则，并了解这些猴子在更一般和更自然的选择中使用什么规则，包括在更丰富的和更接近的觅食地点之间，在更聚集的和更孤立的觅食地点之间。

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.