Collective foraging in dynamic nutritional landscapes

Stable and cohesive social groups are widely observed in animals, but such collectives also come with potential conflicts among their members about when, where, and how to move. Together with collaborators, Urs Kalbitzer is investigating such movement decisions in the group-living and leaf-eating red colobus (Piliocolobus tephrosceles) in their natural habitat in Kibale National Park, Uganda. The team will investigate the collective movement and foraging patterns of red colobus in such a complex, arboreal habitat by collecting high-resolution movement data, and analyze these data in relation to dietary preferences, food resource distribution, structural features of the habitat, the position of other group members, and the social relationships among individuals. Furthermore, the team will investigate how these individual movement patterns are linked to group-level characteristics of movement and spatial cohesiveness (e.g., speed, spread, or shape of the group), which is largely unknown for red colobus and other group-living arboreal primates.