Be early or be tolerated: vervet monkey, Chlorocebus pygerythrus, foraging strategies in a dispersed resource

Abstract

Among social foragers, individuals can actively search for and find food (the producers) or join already discovered food patches (the scroungers). Compared to scroungers, producers often occupy more dangerous outer spatial positions in the group, but they benefit from the finder's advantage, which is the amount of food eaten before the arrival of others. Scroungers may occupy safer positions but they face feeding competition when joining a patch already occupied by others. Here, we report factors influencing intragroup spatial position, feeding strategies and feeding success for a group of wild vervet monkeys, C. pygerythrus, at Lake Nabugabo, Uganda. We collected data using behavioural observations and field experimentation (N = 132 trials) where we set up an artificial food patch with dispersed food rewards. We found that individuals who spent more time in the front-outer position of a moving group produced more. Producers that had a greater finder's time advantage (fed undetected by group members for longer periods) had a greater finder's advantage (consumed more food items before the arrival of other group members), and scroungers that arrived earlier had greater overall feeding success. We found that when the scrounger was higher ranking than other individuals at the patch, they used displacement scrounging (supplanted at least one individual from the patch to gain access to the food resource). However, feeding success did not differ between displacement scrounging and tolerated scrounging (when the scrounger fed at the patch with at least one other individual). Interestingly, we did not find higher-ranking individuals to have greater feeding success than lower-ranking individuals. Our findings corroborate previous studies showing that even among species with a linear dominance hierarchy and high occurrences of within-group contest competition, dominant individuals do not benefit from feeding advantages at large, dispersed food patches since they cannot monopolize the resource. Furthermore, our results emphasize the need to understand factors influencing feeding tolerance, particularly for subordinate individuals, who need to process ecological and social elements to maximize their food acquisition.