The deliberate feeding of primates (i.e., provisioning) has been shown to affect primate ranging behavior. What factors could explain why in some cases provisioned primates expand the size of the home range while in other cases provisioned primates reduce the size of their home range?
For food- enhanced primate populations, optimal foraging theory predicts that because of the clumped distribution and nutritional benefits of anthropo-genic foods, primates are expected to show smaller home ranges, spend less time moving and feeding, and more time resting. Again, it may, however, not be as straightforward as that, as ecological responses can vary, both interspecifically and intraspecifically, depending on the anthropogenic context. Anthropologist Tracie McKinney found that food- enhanced white capuchins in Curú Wildlife Refuge in Costa Rica had a larger home range and a similar activity budget to wild feeding conspecifics. Bruce Wheatley and colleagues found that food- enhanced groups of long- tailed macaques in Bali, Indonesia had smaller home ranges, spent more time resting, and less time moving compared to their wild conspecifics in Kalimantan. In Singapore, a food- enhanced long- tailed macaque group similarly spent less time resting, but more time moving and had a larger monthly home range compared to the “low anthropogenic” group. To understand these differences, we must dig deeper to understand the nature of the anthropogenic foods available to them. At the Monkey Forest site in Ubud, Bali, provisioning of long- tailed macaques is spatially concentrated; whereas in Singapore, provisioning is irregular, meaning that the macaques pri-marily obtain anthropogenic food from refuse sites that are spatially dispersed and where the availability of foods is unpredictable. These studies therefore demon-strate how critical it is for us to examine primate ecological responses across a range of anthropogenically- influenced habitats to better understand the extent of primate ecological flexibility and intraspecific variability and why they respond the way they do.
An interest in crop feeding is certainly not unique to ethnoprimatology, as there exists a rich body of work by social science scholars and conservation managers on crop feeding by wildlife and its impact on human livelihoods.10 Nonetheless, because of its mixed methodological approach incorp-orating theoretical frameworks and methods from biological anthropology, environmental anthropology, and conservation ecology, ethnoprimatology is a particularly well- suited approach to study crop feeding and other ecological outcomes of human- primate sympatry. For indeed, anthropogenic habitat alter-ation can negatively impact primates’ ability to survive, but primate responses to such pressures can, in turn, impose constraints on human livelihoods. The ethnoprimatological approach explores both the human and nonhuman pri-mate perspective to understand patterns of primate ecological flexibility and how both perspectives intersect to affect human- primate coexistence. Therefore, this approach typically entails collecting and integrating quantitative data (e.g., crop loss measurements; the frequency and duration of raiding events; the rela-tionship between crop feeding and wild food availability) and qualitative data (e.g., perceptions of and folklore about primates; why farmers act the way they do). Without measuring actual damage done by primates, a huge disparity may exist between reported and observed damage due to farmers overestimating the amount of crops loss. Moreover, people’s perceptions of the extent of damage may be influenced by factors associated with the animals themselves (e.g., large body size, conspicuous behavior of most crop foraging primates). For example, in Lore Lindu National Park, while farmers believed the Tonkean macaque to be the most destructive crop forager, I found that forest rats were responsible for significantly more damage than macaques