9413000 Peter Rodman The goal of primate ecological studies is to identify the enviornmental pressures that shape primate societies and the behavior of individuals living in them. Most often, they seek to relate the foraging strategies, reproductive decisions, and social behavior of individuals to underlying ecological variables such as the availability and distribution of food resources, This very sophisticated study of a rare South American monkey will provide information on these issues relating to the distribution and availability of food, but it will also test the soco-ecological importance of other food resource characteristics such as their size and shape, chemical composition, toughness, and processing time. The data will also permit the first field test of an ecological model of fission-fusion sociality developed in studies of other related monkeys. Furthermore, these monkeys appear to be a good indicator species for judging the effects of human disturbance on tropical ecosystems, and therefore the results of this study should prove directly important to issues of conservation in Amazonian South America.
