How primates interact with their environment: adaptive geometry, dynamic home ranges, and spatiotemporal structure in behaviour

Abstract

The convergence of recent technical advances in spatial data collection and quantitative analysis offers new opportunities to generate explicitly spatial insights into problems faced by researchers across disciplines. In this context, I examine how social behaviour is shaped by the environment in which it occurs. Specifically, I address the following overarching questions: How do baboons adapt their spatial geometry to optimize foraging while maintaining dominance hierarchies? How can dynamic home range estimation, based on regularly updated kernel density estimates across time, improve our understanding of space use and its role in shaping social and ecological interactions, such as intertroop encounters in vervet monkeys? Is there a relationship between home ranges and intertroop encounters? Specifically, does proximity to the centre of one’s home range influence the probability of winning, as suggested by patterns observed in white-faced capuchins (Crofoot et al., 2008)? Can dynamic home ranges, updated at fine temporal scales, reveal patterns missed by static approaches? Furthermore, what insights emerge when behaviours are analyzed in their absolute spatial and temporal contexts, independent of home range constructs? To answer these questions, I introduce two new methods for analyzing primate interactions with their environment: the Dynamic Home Range Model, which enables users to generate home ranges at variable temporal scales, including a single range, and the Structure of Behaviour Analysis Model, which predicts the spatiotemporal structure of observed behaviours as a three-dimensional point cloud. These models show that baboons are able to adapt their spatial and social geometry as they move through the landscape, in response to food availability and the structure of the environment (Chapter 2); home ranges measured at smaller temporal scales offer greater detail about how animals are responding to seasonal trends in resource availability (Chapter 3); and that while the Samara population of Vervet monkeys does not show a connection between distance to home ranges and winning or loosing an inter-troop encounter, structure in behaviours (aggression and initiation) and outcomes (winning) can be modelled and demonstrate a spatial temporal component to ITE’s (Chapter 4).