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Feeding Ecology And Life History Strategies Of White-Faced Capuchin Monkeys, Elizabeth Eadie

Anthropology ETDs

Dietary niches have widespread effects on individuals life histories, behaviors, and morphologies. Capuchin monkeys inhabit a complex dietary niche that often entails hunting of relatively large vertebrate prey, tool-use, and extraction of embedded resources that other closely related and sympatric species do not exploit. In this dissertation I examine, a) how juvenile capuchins overcome the challenges of reliance on a difficult-to-acquire diet, b) at what age juveniles achieve maximum foraging return rates for difficult-to-acquire foods, and c) what nutritional benefits capuchins obtain from exploitation of these foods. In the process of addressing these questions I test two prominent hypotheses regarding …