The dynamics of crop-foraging by chacma baboons on commercial farms in South Africa

人类与野生动物之间最常见的冲突之一是以掠夺农作物的形式发生的，这在世界各地都很普遍，是一个问题。对野生动物来说，劫掠农作物是一种高风险的行为，但它也是一种高收益的觅食策略——成功的劫掠者从农作物中获得了大量的营养。灵长类动物在以作物为食的物种中名列前茅，狒狒经常被认为是所有灵长类动物中危害最大的。由于具有高度的智慧和适应能力，农民通常无法成功地防止灵长类动物对作物的破坏。袭击严重影响了农民的生计，从而降低了对野生动物的容忍度，并往往导致致命的报复手段。只有当作物袭击对动物的风险增加到超过其好处时，缓解措施才能成功，但这需要对狒狒觅食作物的动态有详细的了解。由于农业地区的狒狒通常对人类高度警惕，因此观察方法的适用性有限。因此，需要创新的方法来调查这个问题。最近，带有加速计的GPS跟踪项圈被用来探索雄性chacma狒狒在南非开普敦郊区袭击时的行为策略。狒狒几乎把所有的时间都花在城市边缘，利用短时间、高活动的方式进入城市地区获取人为食物。当护林员威慑的可能性更大时，活动水平也会增加。因此，与自然觅食种群相比，袭击狒狒极大地改变了它们的活动模式，以利用人类居住地提供的能源，同时将这些地区遭受迫害的风险降至最低。这样的理解可以使管理策略有适当的针对性。大多数关于农作物掠夺的研究都集中在野生动物和自给农业生产者之间的冲突上。然而，野生动物对大规模商业农业的损害也是人类与野生动物冲突的一个主要方面，并提出了其自身的保护挑战，尤其是因为灵长类动物对商业农场的损害带来了巨大的经济成本。在这些商业背景下的进一步研究是一个优先事项。该项目的主要目标是使用复杂的生物记录仪来了解南非一个商业农业地区狒狒的作物觅食行为，该地区报告了人类与灵长类动物的高度冲突。研究结果将用于支持制定管理计划，以减少该地区人类与野生动物的冲突。

One of the most common conflicts between people and wildlife takes the form of crop raiding, which is widespread and an issue throughout the world. Crop raiding is a high-risk behaviour for wildlife, but it is also a high-gain foraging strategy - successful raiders derive substantial nutritional benefits from crops. Primates rank amongst the most problematic of species that forage on crops, and baboons are often cited as the most damaging of all primate crop raiding species. Being highly intelligent and adaptable, farmers often have little success preventing crop damage by primates. Raiding significantly impacts farmers' livelihoods and so reduces tolerance to wildlife and often results in lethal methods of retaliation. Mitigation can only be successful if the risk to animals of crop raiding is increased to outweigh its benefits, but this requires a detailed understanding of the dynamics of crop foraging by the baboons. Since baboons in farming areas are often highly wary of humans, observational methods are limited in their applicability. Innovative approaches are thus required to investigate this problem.Recently, GPS tracking collars with accelerometers have been used to explore the behavioural strategies of male chacma baboons used when raiding in the suburbs of Cape Town, South Africa. The baboons spent almost all of their time at the urban edge, using short, high-activity forays into the urban areas to obtain anthropogenic food. Activity levels were also increased where the likelihood of deterrence by rangers was greater. Raiding baboons had thus dramatically altered their activity patterns compared to natural foraging populations to exploit the energy sources offered by human habitation while minimising the risks of persecution in these areas. Such an understanding allows management strategies to be appropriately targeted.The majority of research on crop raiding has focused on the conflict between wildlife and subsistence agriculturalists. However, wildlife damage to large-scale commercial agriculture is also a major facet of human-wildlife conflict and presents conservation challenges of its own, not least because of significant economic costs of primate damage to commercial farms. Further research in these commercial contexts is a priority. The primary objective of this project is to use sophisticated bio-loggers to understand baboon crop-foraging within a commercial farming region of South Africa that reports high levels of human-primate conflict. The results will be used to support the development of management plans to reduce human-wildlife conflict in the region.