Does relative economic value of food elicit purposeful encounter in the yellow baboons (Papio hamadryas cynocephalus) of Ruaha National Park, Tanzania?
In the dry season, baboons traveled purposefully to spatially predictable foods that provided a relatively large number of grams per minute of preparation (e.g., economical foods), but not to predictable foods that merely accounted for a large proportion of feeding time (Pochron in Int J Primatol 22:773-785, 2001). In this paper, I examined the generality of those findings across seasons and applied the same methods to baboons eating a lush-season diet. I hypothesized that baboons should travel quickly and directly (i.e., purposefully) only to economical foods. The change in diet brought about by season provided an important comparison. In the lush season, none of the spatially predictable foods provided a relatively large number of grams per minute of preparation, so baboons were predicted to travel purposefully to no lush-season food. In short, baboons who traveled quickly and directly to some foods in the dry season were expected to use indirect and/or slow travel for all lush-season foods. The hypothesis was supported--baboons traveled quickly and directly to no lush-season food. Detailed comparisons between the dry- and lush-season characteristics of baobab fruit show that the food's economic value relative to other foods predicts concurrent fast and direct travel, or the lack thereof, in both seasons.
Pochron
Sharon T
ST
Department of Anthropology, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA. spochron@ms.cc.sunysb.edu
D000818:Animals; D004032:Diet; D005247:Feeding Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D008124:Locomotion; D016015:Logistic Models; D008297:Male; D048529:Papio hamadryas / Q000502:physiology* / Q000523:psychology; D012621:Seasons; D013636:Tanzania