I study red-tailed monkeys (Cercopithecus ascanius) as a case study to investigate what behavioral and physiological strategies are used by small-bodied consumers to overcome feeding competition from larger species.

Project overview:

Animals live by two primary drivers: the need to find food, and the ability to convert that food energy into offspring. The realization of these goals fundamentally determines individual fitness, as well as population density and distribution more broadly. Competition for limited resources is a pervasive aspect of life, as it can limit energy gain, especially in small consumers in a competitor-dense environment.

Though decades of primate research have investigated within-species competition, far less attention has focused on how the presence and abundance of competitors affects the foraging of small-bodied primates. Competition is notoriously difficult to study because it often takes the shape of avoidance and preemptive consumption of foods, instead of direct contest. It is also a particularly thorny topic to study in primates because they have diverse and nutritionally variable diets, making it difficult to assess the amount of food that a particular species has access to. Energetic intake is arduous to establish accurately, and such measures tend to be invasive or time- and labor-intensive in wild animals. I use novel tools in endocrinology to quantify the effect of competition from larger species on energy gain of small-bodied primates.

I utilize non-invasively collected urine and feces to measure by-products of metabolism as a means of more accurately estimating short-term energy fluctuations. By measuring a panel of biomarkers, I will draw a comprehensive picture of how differing sets of competitors, seasonal change, and anthropogenic habitat degradation affect energy gain.

A broader perspective of primate food-web interactions can lead to a better understanding of the suite of ecological pressures that shape primate density and distribution, and of those that our ancestors encountered as they transitioned out of forests and into the savannas. Drawing on field research with arboreal, fruit-eating primates in Uganda, I propose an integrative approach that incorporates new methods for studying primate energy gain in the context of large-scale ecological interactions to target the gaps that still exist in primate ecology literature.

This work is funded by:

• UCSB - Anthropology Department - Graduate Student Summer Research Grant (2018, 2019, 2020)

• UCSB - Department of Anthropology - Charles J. Erasmus Fun for Research (2018, 2019, 2020)

• UCSB - Broom Center for Demography - Graduate Student Research and Training Grant (2018, 2019, 2020)

• UCSB - Regents Fellowship Award (2017-18)

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