After the fire: benefits of reduced ground cover for vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops)

Abstract

Here we describe changes in ranging behavior and other activities of vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) after a wildfire eliminated grass cover in a large area near the study group's home range. Soon after the fire, the vervets ranged farther away from tall trees that provide refuge from mammalian predators, and moved into the burned area where they had never been observed to go before the fire occurred. Visibility at vervet eye-level was 10 times farther in the burned area than in unburned areas. They traveled faster, and adult females spent more time feeding and less time scanning bipedally in the burned area than in the unburned area. The burned area's greater visibility may have lowered the animals' perceived risk of predation there, and may have provided them with an unusual opportunity to eat acacia ants.

The pyrophilic primate hypothesis

“…Exploitation of burned areas has also been observed among vervet monkeys. Our own research shows that vervets in South Africa expand their territory to encompass newly burned areas to take advantage of pyrogenic improvements . Anecdotal evidence further illuminates the relationship that nonhuman primates have with fire.…”

Chimpanzee food preferences, associative learning, and the origins of cooking

“…Motivation (Dashiell, 1925), inhibitory control (Reynolds, De Wit, & Richards, 2002), causal understanding (Blaisdell, Sawa, Leising, & Waldmann, 2006), and planning (Crystal, 2013), for example, have all been claimed, to various degrees, in rats. Vervet monkeys, like chimpanzees, exploit areas burned by wildfires for ranging and feeding purposes (Jaffe & Isbell, 2009; Herzog et al, 2014; Herzog, Keefe, Parker, & Hawkes, in press); and it is likely that a wide variety of captive animals, primate and non-primate alike, would prefer cooked to uncooked foods, due to considerations from optimal foraging theory (Charnov, 1976; Schoener, 1971; Wrangham, 2009). Some of the purported psychological prerequisites for cooking may have been around a long time, perhaps tens of millions of years, something that cannot be recognized without applying a more broadly comparative approach (i.e., extending the discussion beyond chimpanzees or apes generally).…”

Brief communication: Reaction to fire by savanna chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) at Fongoli, Senegal: Conceptualization of “fire behavior” and the case for a chimpanzee model

“…However, little information on the proximate responses of animals to the presence of fire is available. Indeed, numerous studies have addressed the responses of living people to fire (Fessler, 2006), but we know little about how other primates react to fire, save for their behavior in areas that have been burned (Berenstain, 1986;O'Brien et al, 2003;Peres et al, 2003;Jaffe and Isbell, 2009). Given the history of difficulty in assessing fire use archaeologically (Pickering et al, 2008), estimates of which hominid species exhibited such behavior are necessarily conservative.…”