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| Pitufo forages for bromeliad shoots. |
The most affected group was Newman’s group, which had its
entire home range burned. It was amazing to observe how they coped with such a
drastic change. At first, they foraged on the charred ground for the burned
remains of last year’s fruits, crunching loudly on moths that they normally
never eat and getting chased off of farms they normally never visit, where they
braved the dogs and rock-throwing local people to try to access much-needed fruit
trees. Once the burned bromeliad patches began to regenerate, sending out new
growth, the monkeys specialized on eating these bitter shoots.
The Costa
Rican park service has requested that we more formally study the effects of
fire on the forest and on the monkey population in particular, so that they can
use this information to develop management plans. We would like to study the impact of the fire
on the capuchins’ ranging patterns, their diet, their metabolism, and their
ability to reproduce. Their resilience is remarkable, and it will be
interesting to document the strategies individuals and social groups use to
compensate for dramatic changes in food availability. We are currently
collecting pilot data and writing new grant proposals in order to conduct a
long-term study on how capuchin foraging strategies change in response to
ecological stressors like forest fires.