Abstract
Food intake (i.e., the amount of food consumed by an individual) is a crucial measure for studying feeding behavior, but its measurement requires high visibility of individuals and long recording sessions, which are often difficult to accomplish under field conditions. As a consequence, studies on the feeding behavior of primates typically do not estimate food intake directly, and focus rather on studying dietary patterns through indirect measures of food intake, such as time spent feeding, number of food bites and food intake rates. The aim of the present study was to determine the validity of these estimators of food intake in mantled howling monkeys (Alouatta palliata) by comparing the estimations with the direct measurement of food intake. We recorded 97 feeding episodes of two male and two female adults, during which we determined the number of ingested food units (i.e., number of leaves and number of fruits), the number of bites taken and time spent feeding. After weighing units of food similar to those consumed, we calculated food intake and mean intake rates per food type (ripe fruits, unripe fruits, mature leaves, and young leaves). The number of bites taken by mantled howling monkeys during feeding episodes was strongly related to food intake, and this relationship was not affected by the type of food ingested. In contrast, neither time spent feeding nor food ingestion rate were related to food intake. These results suggest that the number of bites could be used as a valid proxy to study food intake in this species, whereas the other two measures are likely to yield inaccurate estimates of food intake.
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Acknowledgments
We thank S. Cañadas-Santiago, P. Cruz-Miros, A. Gómez-Martínez, and A. Moctezuma-García, as well as several volunteers, for their support during fieldwork. La Flor de Catemaco granted permission to work at this site, and Ing. J.L. Ponce-Puente facilitated our work in a variety of ways. This study was supported by Universidad Veracruzana and Conacyt (Grant No. 489955). We thank F. Aureli, an associate editor of Primates and an anonymous reviewer for very useful comments and corrections in previous versions of the manuscript. A. Rangel-Negrín and P.A.D. Dias thank Mariana and Fernando for constant support and inspiration to study primate behavior. Sampling procedures were approved by SEMARNAT (SGPA/DGVS/10637/11) and adhered to Mexican law (NOM-059-SEMARNAT-2010).
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Reynoso-Cruz, J.E., Rangel-Negrín, A., Coyohua-Fuentes, A. et al. Measures of food intake in mantled howling monkeys. Primates 57, 161–166 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-016-0513-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-016-0513-7