Abstract
We describe predation on an adult rodent rock cavy and sharing of the carcass by a group of male bearded capuchins. Despite many studies, such an interaction has never been observed in bearded capuchins. Rock cavies are large rodents weighing around 25% of the weight of an adult male bearded capuchin. The capuchins chased, caught, and shared the adult rock cavy. We observed no strong evidence of communication or division of roles in the successful capture, suggesting that the social hunting episode was not necessarily coordinated or collaborative. Instead, the individuals apparently tried to achieve the same goal of capturing the prey simultaneously (i.e., individuals synchronously performed similar actions to achieve the task), with the strongest individual emerging victorious and tolerating prey sharing afterwards. Our observations add to the understanding of cooperative behaviours such as social hunting and food sharing in bearded capuchins.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the staff at Serra das Almas Private Reserve of Natural Heritage. RFF is supported by a FACEPE (Pernambuco Foundation to Support Science and Technology) scholarship (BFT-01602.04/17) and CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel - Finance code 001). BB is supported by a CNPq-Productivity grant Pq2 309256/2019-4 (The Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development). We also thank anonymous reviewers for their input in our manuscript.
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Filho, R.F., Veiga, S. & Bezerra, B. Bearded capuchin (Sapajus libidinosus) predation on a rock cavy (Kerodon rupestris) followed by prey sharing. Primates 62, 463–466 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-021-00894-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-021-00894-x