Human–wildlife conflict: Proximate predictors of aggression between humans and rhesus macaques in India

Abstract

Macaques live in close contact with humans across South and Southeast Asia, and direct interaction is frequent. Aggressive contact is a concern in many locations, particularly among populations of rhesus and longtail macaques that co-inhabit urbanized cities and towns with humans. We investigated the proximate factors influencing the occurrence of macaque aggression toward humans as well as human aggression toward macaques to determine the extent to which human behavior elicits macaque aggression and vice versa. We conducted a 3-month study of four free-ranging populations of rhesus macaques in Dehradun, India from October-December 2012, using event sampling to record all instances of human-macaque interaction (N = 3120). Our results show that while human aggression was predicted by the potential for economic losses or damage, macaque aggression was influenced by aggressive or intimidating behavior by humans as well as recent rates of conspecific aggression. Further, adult female macaques participated in aggression more frequently than expected, whereas adult and subadult males participated as frequently as expected. Our analyses demonstrate that neither human nor macaque aggression is unprovoked. Rather, both humans and macaques are responding to one another's behavior. Mitigation of human-primate conflict, and indeed other types of human-wildlife conflict in such coupled systems, will require a holistic investigation of the ways in which each participant is responding to, and consequently altering, the behavior of the other.

Impact of anthropogenic factors on affiliative behaviors among bonnet macaques

“…Bonnet macaques are found in sub-tropical to dry deciduous or scrub-forest environments in Southern India (Sinha, 2013), where they also tend to inhabit anthropogenic landscapes (Radhakrishna & Sinha, 2011;Singh & Rao, 2004;Sinha & Mukhopadhyay, 2013). Research on other macaque species has revealed that individual attributes like sex and dominance rank may influence variation in animals' tendencies to interact with humans (rhesus macaques: Beisner et al, 2015; longtailed macaques: Fuentes & Gamerl, 2005) and their grooming strategies (Henzi & Barrett, 1999). In addition, affiliative behaviors may also be impacted by both group-specific attributes (e.g., group size, sex-ratio, home-range size) as these may determine the number and spatial spread of potentially available partners (Berman & Thierry, 2010;Lehmann et al, 2007), and by seasonal differences in climatic conditions which influence ecological factors such as food distribution or human presence/activity and thereby primate socioecology and behavior (Korstjens & Hillyer, 2016).…”

Identification of behaviours from accelerometer data in a wild social primate

“…Among many applications, such methods could be used to document situations where primates are in conflict with people in species ranging from chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) [26] to macaques (Macaca mulatta) [27] allowing us to quantify the occurrence of such events and their spatial-temporal dynamics. One of the most high-profile non-human primate-human conflict occurs with people and baboons in the Cape Peninsula, South Africa, with baboons raiding bins, properties or taking food directly from people themselves daily [28].…”

Interactions with humans impose time constraints on urban-dwelling rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)

“…Here we test whether direct interactions with humans either constrain animals' activity budgets (time constraints hypothesis) or free up the time they can allocate to resting and social interactions (free time hypothesis) in an urban-dwelling population of rhesus macaques. Rhesus macaques inhabit a variety of interfaces, from agricultural areas to cities and temples, resulting in a close proximity between macaques and humans (Chauhan & Pirta, 2010a;Southwick & Siddiqi, 2011;Beisner et al, 2015). To date, studies have shown that such close proximity leads to frequent interactions between the two species, which can take both potentially negative (e.g., mutual aggression) and positive (e.g., humans provisioning the macaques) forms (Chauhan & Pirta, 2010a, b;Beisner et al, 2015).…”

“…Rhesus macaques inhabit a variety of interfaces, from agricultural areas to cities and temples, resulting in a close proximity between macaques and humans (Chauhan & Pirta, 2010a;Southwick & Siddiqi, 2011;Beisner et al, 2015). To date, studies have shown that such close proximity leads to frequent interactions between the two species, which can take both potentially negative (e.g., mutual aggression) and positive (e.g., humans provisioning the macaques) forms (Chauhan & Pirta, 2010a, b;Beisner et al, 2015). However, little is known about whether and how such interactions with humans may impact macaque activity budgets, including affiliative social behaviours like grooming, despite well-documented evidence that affiliative social behaviours are associated with critical health and fitness benefits in group-living animals (Silk et al, 2003).…”