Abstract
Increasing urbanization and deforestation have enhanced the opportunities of contact between humans and monkeys and the impact of human activities on primate behavior is receiving growing attention. This study explores whether activity budgets and diet of a group of capuchin monkeys (Cebus libidinosus) inhabiting the area of the swimming pools of the National Park of Brasília is affected by the presence of visitors providing food to them. During one year, both in the dry and the wet seasons, we scored capuchins' behavior via scan sampling every ten minutes. Results showed that this group spent less time foraging for wild foods than other comparable groups living in similar habitats. Moreover, capuchins relied more on human food during the dry season, when pulpy fruits were less available, than in the wet season. Our findings confirm other studies on different monkey species that have shown that access to human food decreases the time spent foraging for wild food and the home range size. They also show that capuchins are able to modify their diet, to exploit alternative food sources, and to change their activity budget in response to the availability of new food opportunities and to seasonal food availability.
Highlights
The neotropical primate species Cebus libidinosus, formerly considered a subspecies of Cebus apella, belongs to the Cebidae family, Platirrhinae infraorder (Groves, 2001)
We investigated the activity budgets and diet of a group of wild capuchin monkeys living in a semi-deciduous forest in the National Park of Brasília
The first aim of this study was to assess whether seasonal differences in the availability of wild food, 1 and whether the presence and abundance of human food (We refer to the food the monkeys find in the forest as wild food, and to the food brought by visitors to the Park, or bought by them into the Park, as human food), affected the monkeys’ activity budgets and diet
Summary
The neotropical primate species Cebus libidinosus, formerly considered a subspecies of Cebus apella, belongs to the Cebidae family, Platirrhinae infraorder (Groves, 2001). Capuchin monkeys live in a great variety of habitats. They are present in almost all tropical forest habitats, both rain forest and deciduous forest (Janson, 1985); capuchins can live in limited or secondary forest fragments, and do not excessively resent human presence (Hawkes et al, 1982). Capuchins are omnivorous; their diet is constituted principally of fruits, but they eat flowers, buds, roots, arthropods, small amphibians and reptiles, eggs, nestling birds and small mammals (Fragaszy et al, 2004). Capuchins’ feeding techniques, that include complex and unusual manipulative skills, allow them to exploit food sources that are not accessible to other primate species
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