Stone tool use in wild bearded capuchin monkeys, Cebus libidinosus. Is it a strategy to overcome food scarcity?
Highlights
► We assessed if food availability affects tool use in wild bearded capuchin monkeys. ► We tested the predictions of the necessity and the opportunity hypotheses. ► All capuchins cracked food items other than palm nuts when available. ► Adult males cracked nuts more in the dry season when catulè nuts are abundant. ► In our field site capuchins use tools opportunistically.
Section snippets
Site
The study area is located at Fazenda Boa Vista (hereafter, FBV; 9°39′36″ S, 45°25′10″W; see map in the Supplementary material) in the northeastern Brazilian state of Piauí, 21 km northwest of the town of Gilbués. The physical geography of the field site is a sandy plain at approximately 420 m above sea level punctuated by sandstone ridges, pinnacles and plateaus (morros) surrounded by cliffs composed of sedimentary rock rising steeply to 20–100 m above the plain. The cliffs and plateaus consist of
Seasonality and Food Availability
Annual rainfall at FBV averaged 1290 mm per year. Total rainfall recorded from June 2006 to May 2007 was 1162 mm and from June 2007 to April 2008 1418 mm. Overall, from May to September rainfall averaged 25 mm and from October to April 1266 mm. The annual mean ± SD of maximum temperature was 32.8 ± 2.2 °C while the annual mean of minimum temperature was 21.5 ± 1.6 °C (see Fig. 1). Table 2 reports the median seasonal values for each climatic variable. Overall our data match the two climatic seasons reported
Seasonality, Food Availability and Tool Use
Our 2 years of climatic data (rainfall, temperature and percentage humidity) match those provided for previous years for the same region by the Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation). In FBV we observed a lack of rainfall during several months and this allowed definition of a dry season (5 months with mean monthly rainfall of 5.5 mm) and a wet season (7 months with mean monthly rainfall of 181 mm).
Unexpectedly, the indirect assessment of food availability via traps indicates that
Acknowledgments
We thank the Oliveira family for permission to work on their land, E. Darvin Ramos da Silva for collaborating in data collection, Jozemar, Arizomar and Marino Junior for assistance in the field, Paolo Ciucci and Vincenzo Gervasi for discussion and statistical advice concerning ecology of capuchins, Elsa Addessi, Valentina Truppa, Barth and Kristin Wright for helpful comments on the manuscript. Funded by University La Sapienza of Rome, EU FP6 NEST Programme ANALOGY (No 029088), FAPESP (MPV:
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