Linking Field and Laboratory Approaches for Studying Primate Locomotor Responses to Support Orientation

Abstract

The benefit of understanding primate locomotion in detail has potential application for understanding how primates use their habitat, e.g., the forest canopy layers for arboreal primates. Energy intake (feeding ecology and diet), behavior, travel distances, and energy expenditure all combine to influence a primates's choice of locomotion mode. Increasingly, an arboreal primate's territory is being represented as a 3D image encompassing time, horizontal distance, and vertical distance. Understanding locomotion has conservation benefits relating to how primates adapt to disturbance, i.e., if the dominant locomotion has to change significantly to cope with habitat changes. Also of great importance is relating energetic expenditure on travel to diet, energetic intake, food availability, and travel distance and how these may change seasonally. Using wild gibbons as a case study, I will provide insights into how laboratory techniques can be brought effectively into long-term field studies and the benefits to conservation that can be achieved.