Department of Population Health & Reproduction, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California, Davis, Davis, California.
Institute of Human Biology and Evolution, University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań, Poland.
Am J Phys Anthropol. 2020 Apr;171(4):704-717. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.24013. Epub 2020 Feb 16.
In primates, allogrooming and other affiliative behaviors confer many benefits and may be influenced by many socioecological factors. Of these, the impact of anthropogenic factors remain relatively understudied. Here we ask whether interactions with humans decreased macaques' affiliative behaviors by imposing time-constraints, or increased these behaviors on account of more free-/available-time due to macaques' consumption of high-energy human foods.
In Southern India, we collected data on human-macaque and macaque-macaque interactions using focal-animal sampling on two groups of semi-urban bonnet macaques for 11 months. For each macaque within each climatic season, we calculated frequencies of human-macaque interactions, rates of monitoring human activity and foraging on anthropogenic food, dominance ranks, grooming duration, number of unique grooming partners, and frequencies of other affiliative interactions.
We found strong evidence for time-constraints on grooming. Macaques that monitored humans more groomed for shorter durations and groomed fewer partners, independent of their group membership, sex, dominance rank, and season. However, monitoring humans had no impact on other affiliative interactions. We found no evidence for the free-time hypothesis: foraging on anthropogenic food was unrelated to grooming and other affiliation.
Our results are consistent with recent findings on other urban-dwelling species/populations. Macaques in such environments may be especially reliant on other forms of affiliation that are of short duration (e.g., coalitionary support, lip-smacking) and unaffected by time-constraints. We stress on the importance of evaluating human impact on inter-individual differences in primate/wildlife behavior for conservation efforts.
在灵长类动物中，异体梳理和其他亲和行为带来了许多益处，可能受到许多社会生态因素的影响。在这些因素中，人为因素的影响仍相对研究不足。在这里，我们想知道人类的互动是否通过施加时间限制而减少了猕猴的亲和行为，或者由于猕猴食用高热量的人类食物而增加了这些行为，因为它们有更多的空闲/可用时间。
在印度南部，我们使用两个半城市冕狐猴群的焦点动物取样法，在 11 个月的时间里收集了关于人类-猕猴和猕猴-猕猴相互作用的数据。对于每个气候季节的每只猕猴，我们计算了人类-猕猴相互作用的频率、监测人类活动和食用人为食物的频率、优势等级、梳理持续时间、独特梳理伙伴的数量以及其他亲和互动的频率。
我们有充分的证据表明梳理受到时间限制。监测人类活动的猕猴梳理的持续时间更短，梳理的伙伴更少，而与它们的群体成员身份、性别、优势等级和季节无关。然而，监测人类活动对其他亲和互动没有影响。我们没有发现自由时间假说的证据：食用人为食物与梳理和其他社交活动无关。
我们的结果与最近对其他城市居住的物种/种群的研究结果一致。在这种环境中的猕猴可能特别依赖于其他持续时间较短的社交形式（例如，联盟支持，咂嘴），并且不受时间限制的影响。我们强调评估人类对灵长类动物/野生动物行为的个体差异的影响对保护工作的重要性。
