Food-sharing behaviour within a group of free-living Endangered Coimbra-Filho’s titi monkeys

Abstract

Socioecological studies related to food-sharing behaviours in titi monkeys are scarce, with no such reports for the Endangered Coimbra-Filho’s titi monkey, Callicebus coimbrai. We aimed to describe the pattern of food-sharing behaviours during monitoring (444 h) of a wild group of Coimbra-Filho’s titi monkeys inhabiting a fragment of Atlantic forest in Northeast Brazil. We reported 43 food-sharing events (23 food-begging and 20 transfer attempt events). For the food-begging events, infants were the main beggars (74 %) while adult males were the main possessors (48 %). High-quality foods were more shared between related and unrelated individuals. Infants were the most successful beggars, receiving most of the high-quality food. Coimbra-Filho’s titi monkeys did not require any special skills to access the high-quality or easy-to-process food items related to the food-sharing events, suggesting that food sharing in these monkeys is linked to the kin selection and sharing-under-pressure hypotheses.