Ethnoprimatology of the Shipibo of the upper Ucayali River, Perú.

In the Anthropocene, primate conservation can only take place when considering human culture, perspectives, and needs. Such approaches are increasingly important under the growing impact of anthropogenic activities and increasing number of threatened primates. The Amazon rainforest, rich in cultural and biological diversity, where indigenous people play a crucial role in primate conservation, provides ample opportunity to study human-primate interactions and the sociocultural context in which they occur. Human activities threaten the Amazon's fragile ecosystems and its primates, which play a key role in its maintenance and regeneration. This study focuses on one of the largest indigenous groups in the Peruvian Amazon: the Shipibo. Interviews and participant observation were used to investigate local perceptions of animal presence and depletion, food preferences, and how primates are incorporated into daily life and culture. Since time immemorial and still today, primates remain important in Shipibo culture, mythology, and subsistence. Local Shipibo participants consistently identified the presence of 13 species of primate. Primates were among the preferred species for consumption, pet keeping, and held a fundamental role in mythology, traditional knowledge, and storytelling. Large-bodied primates were often mentioned as being locally extinct, with reports and observations suggesting increasing consumption of smaller-bodied primates. Commonly perceived reasons for primate depletion include noise disturbance, hunting, and population growth, often in parallel. This study sheds light on the cultural context of an area rich in biodiversity, where primates, essential for ecological balance and integral to Shipibo lives and identity, are being depleted. We highlight the need for an inclusive ethnoprimatological approach to conserving primates and preserving indigenous heritage while improving local livelihoods.

Working from the Inside Out: Fostering Intrinsic Motivation and Expanding Our Criteria for Conservation Success.

Primatological research is often associated with understanding animals and their habitats, yet practical conservation depends entirely on human actions. This encompasses the activities of Indigenous and local people, conservationists, and NGOs working on the ground, as well as more remote funders and policymakers. In this paper we explore what it means to be a conservationist in the 2020s. While many primatologists accept the benefits of more socially inclusive dimensions of research and conservation practice, in reality there remain many challenges. We discuss the role primatologists can play to enhance interdisciplinary working and their relationships with communities living in and around their study sites, and examine how increased reflexivity and consideration of one's positionality can improve primatological practice. Emphasis on education and stakeholder consultation may still echo colonial, top-down dialogues, and the need for greater emphasis on genuine knowledge-sharing among all stakeholders should be recognised. If we are sincere about this approach, we might need to redefine how we see, consider, and define conservation success. We may also have to embrace more compromises. By evaluating success in conservation we explore how reflexive engagements with our positionality and equitable knowledge-sharing contribute to fostering intrinsic motivation and building resilience.

The Gombe Ecosystem Health Project: 16 years of program evolution and lessons learned.

Infectious disease outbreaks pose a significant threat to the conservation of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and all threatened nonhuman primates. Characterizing and mitigating these threats to support the sustainability and welfare of wild populations is of the highest priority. In an attempt to understand and mitigate the risk of disease for the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park, Tanzania, we initiated a long-term health-monitoring program in 2004. While the initial focus was to expand the ongoing behavioral research on chimpanzees to include standardized data on clinical signs of health, it soon became evident that the scope of the project would ideally include diagnostic surveillance of pathogens for all primates (including people) and domestic animals, both within and surrounding the National Park. Integration of these data, along with in-depth post-mortem examinations, have allowed us to establish baseline health indicators to inform outbreak response. Here, we describe the development and expansion of the Gombe Ecosystem Health project, review major findings from the research and summarize the challenges and lessons learned over the past 16 years. We also highlight future directions and present the opportunities and challenges that remain when implementing studies of ecosystem health in a complex, multispecies environment.

Roadside monkeys: anthropogenic effects on moor macaque (Macaca maura) ranging behavior in Bantimurung Bulusaraung National Park, Sulawesi, Indonesia.

A growing body of research focuses on how anthropogenic factors affect the behavior and ecology of primates and their ecosystems. Infrastructural development, such as roads, is an increasingly pervasive anthropogenic impact that destroys primate habitat, affects the distribution and dispersal of primates, and facilitates human-primate interactions. At our field site in Bantimurung-Bulusaraung National Park, Sulawesi, Indonesia, a major road bisects the habitat of the endangered moor macaque (Macaca maura). Beginning in 2015, we observed a behavioral shift by our main study group: they began spending more time along the road foraging in trash pits and waiting for provisions from vehicles. Our objective in this study was to examine how access to anthropogenic foods has affected the group's ranging behavior by comparing ranging data collected before (2010-2011) and after the shift (2016-2017). In contrast to what we expected, home ranges were significantly larger and daily travel distance was significantly longer after the shift compared to before. As predicted, mean distance to the road decreased after the shift. These results likely reflect the irregular and spatially dispersed nature of provisioning at this site. The macaques appear to be attracted to the road because it presents opportunities to obtain palatable and energy-dense foods. Our results indicate that moor macaques are able to flexibly adjust their ranging behavior in response to anthropogenic impacts. However, given the risks of being in proximity to roads and humans, management of this emerging human-macaque interface is needed.

'Emptying Forests?' Conservation Implications of Past Human-Primate Interactions.

Non-human primates are among the most vulnerable tropical animals to extinction and ~50% of primate species are endangered. Human hunting is considered a major cause of increasingly 'empty forests', yet archaeological data remains under-utilised in testing this assertion over the longer-term. Zooarchaeological datasets allow investigation of human exploitation of primates and the reconstruction of extinction, extirpation, and translocation processes. We evaluate the application and limitations of data from zooarchaeological studies spanning the past 45 000 years in South and Southeast Asia in guiding primate conservation efforts. We highlight that environmental change was the primary threat to many South and Southeast Asian non-human primate populations during much of the Holocene, foreshadowing human-induced land-use and environmental change as major threats of the 21st century.

Slow Loris Trade in Vietnam: Exploring Diverse Knowledge and Values.

Wildlife trade can present a major threat to primate populations. In Vietnam, slow lorises (genus Nycticebus) are subject to local, regional and international demand for diverse uses including as medicine, as meat and for pets. Ethnographic approaches explore the nuances of human-primate interactions in complex sociocultural contexts. We combined ethnographic interviews of key informants with information from questionnaires, focus groups and a movie broadcast on Vietnamese television to explore diverse knowledge and values related to slow lorises and their use in trade in Vietnam. We infer prices, uses and networks for expanding targeted regional and international markets as compared to the opportunistic local one. We highlight key findings related to gendered knowledge about slow lorises and more-than-human ontologies of slow lorises as active participants in human-slow loris interactions. We suggest that conservation efforts should pay attention to the clarification of vernacular names, and use names that highlight ecological or behavioural qualities of slow lorises, rather than other names that could be confused with medicinal remedies. Our results confirm the dynamic complexity of trade in Vietnam, highlighting the importance of ethnographic methods to explore diverse knowledge and values for place-based or site-appropriate conservation management of primates and other highly traded taxa.

Biosocial Conservation: Integrating Biological and Ethnographic Methods to Study Human-Primate Interactions.

Biodiversity conservation is one of the grand challenges facing society. Many people interested in biodiversity conservation have a background in wildlife biology. However, the diverse social, cultural, political, and historical factors that influence the lives of people and wildlife can be investigated fully only by incorporating social science methods, ideally within an interdisciplinary framework. Cultural hierarchies of knowledge and the hegemony of the natural sciences create a barrier to interdisciplinary understandings. Here, we review three different projects that confront this difficulty, integrating biological and ethnographic methods to study conservation problems. The first project involved wildlife foraging on crops around a newly established national park in Gabon. Biological methods revealed the extent of crop loss, the species responsible, and an effect of field isolation, while ethnography revealed institutional and social vulnerability to foraging wildlife. The second project concerned great ape tourism in the Central African Republic. Biological methods revealed that gorilla tourism poses risks to gorillas, while ethnography revealed why people seek close proximity to gorillas. The third project focused on humans and other primates living alongside one another in Morocco. Incorporating shepherds in the coproduction of ecological knowledge about primates built trust and altered attitudes to the primates. These three case studies demonstrate how the integration of biological and social methods can help us to understand the sustainability of human-wildlife interactions, and thus promote coexistence. In each case, an integrated biosocial approach incorporating ethnographic data produced results that would not otherwise have come to light. Research that transcends conventional academic boundaries requires the openness and flexibility to move beyond one's comfort zone to understand and acknowledge the legitimacy of "other" kinds of knowledge. It is challenging but crucial if we are to address conservation problems effectively.