Benefits of Bad Table Manners?

When you work with capuchins you notice very quickly as you creep around the forest that when they feed in a fruiting tree, they tend to leave behind an absolute disaster. Capuchin monkeys are incredibly messing eaters. They waste a lot of fruit, which ends up mostly lying on the forest floor. Maybe waste is too strong a word. At the very least, the nutrients from the fruits go back into the soil, enriching it for other plants or ants and other insects get to enjoy a feast. But the primate team at Para La Tierra wanted to know if anything a little bigger than insects was benefitting from the remains of capuchin dinnertime.

Interspecific associations have been observed between several species of capuchins and other large mammals including peccaries, coatis, tayras and howler monkeys. In 2014, Tortato et al. released a short article documenting collared peccaries following groups of hooded capuchin (Sapajus cay) and eating the leftover palm fruits in the Brazilian Pantanal. Collared peccaries are a species that we have in Laguna Blanca and we decided it would be interesting to find out whether or not there would be any such interspecific interactions here.

Intern Kelly joined the primate team in May 2016 to carry out data collection on the dietary diversity of the capuchin groups for her masters project. During her internship we decided to pilot the interspecific associations study. Armed with camera traps, she began spontaneous data collection to test the theory that other mammals eat capuchin leftovers. During her monkey follows, she would set up the cameras facing the bases of the fruiting trees that the monkeys had recently visited. The cameras remained out for three or four days.

Almost immediately the cameras yielded exciting and often surprising results! Actually eating the fruit we filmed 6 different species: the crab-eating fox, Azara’s agouti, an unidentified Didelphid opossum, brown rats (unfortunately!), the Brazilian rabbit and the South-American coati. The most frequent visitors were definitely the agoutis! Appearances were also made by other species that didn’t eat the left over fruit including red brocket deer, nine-banded armadillos and, most excitingly, an oncilla and the reserve’s first record of a margay! The two cats are extremely similar and were very difficult to tell apart in the videos and photographs that we have but we are now sure judging from tail length in relation to body length!

Some of the camera trap photos we have snapped so far.

This project is now going to continue under the care of new primate intern Gabriel. Hopefully we continue to get such exciting results!