Abstract
Generalist wildlife species often thrive in urban environments because of increased anthropogenic resources. However, human-wildlife interactions, especially if negative, raise concerns for urban wildlife management. An enhanced understanding of wildlife behavioural flexibility has been suggested to be a key tool to provide educated and effective management strategies. We therefore investigated how availability of semi-naturally occurring food affected behavioural foraging patterns of urban vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus), a generalist primate commonly found in urban areas of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Over one year, we conducted 20 min. focal animal observations recording foraging behaviour and food consumption. We used a combination of a generalised linear model and descriptive statistics to examine the relationship between anthropogenic food consumption and semi-natural food availability. Our analyses showed that anthropogenic food consumption decreased as semi-natural food availability increased. We also showed that increased aggression from humans towards vervet monkeys decreased time spent foraging on anthropogenic food. Our study highlights how vervet monkeys have adapted to their urban landscape, showing foraging flexibility in response to available food resources and the frequency of human interactions. We suggest how our results can be applied for management recommendations, particularly controlling anthropogenic food availability and decreasing negative human-wildlife interactions.
Highlights
Due to increasing human populations, almost all wildlife today live in habitats that are altered to some degree by anthropogenic activities (Tilman et al 2017)
On average vervet monkeys spent a greater percentage of time per focal observation foraging on anthropogenic food (44.1 ± 15.93%) and less time per focal observation foraging on semi-natural food (15.6 ± 15.71%) (Table 2)
Vervet monkey’s consumed more natural food (61.1 ± 8.94) in their diet than anthropogenic food (38.6 ± 8.66) (Table 2.) these results seem contradictory, this is due to the difference in measurements
Summary
Due to increasing human populations, almost all wildlife today live in habitats that are altered to some degree by anthropogenic activities (Tilman et al 2017). Generalist wildlife species often exploit urban environments because of increased anthropogenic resources (Lowry et al 2013). Understanding how an animal persists in an anthropogenically disturbed environment is imperative to provide guidance for human-wildlife cohabitation and reduce negative interactions (Dickman 2010; Nowak and Lee 2013; Hockings et al 2015; Patterson et al 2019). An increase in wildlife inhabiting the anthropogenic dominated landscape is creating a complex scale of interactions for both humans and wildlife (Nyhus, 2016). Urban areas often provide concentrated high value resources to wildlife that generalist species can exploit (Widdows and Downs 2016). Human-wildlife cohabitation can have potential costs for wildlife such as increased aggression from humans (Nyhus 2016), that may impose time constraints or elicit a stress response (Kaburu et al 2019a). The multiple facets of human-wildlife interactions need to be considered to understand wildlife behavioural flexibility for the benefit of human-
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