- By Nuadox Crew -

Researchers from the University of Georgia and San Diego State University have found that the action of feeding wildlife could be more detrimental to animals than previously understood.

In a paper published recently in Nature Scientific Reports, researchers found that feeding wildlife can disrupt the social lives of animal communities, which they discovered by observing and documenting the behavior of moor macaque monkeys along a wooded roadway on the island of Sulawesi in eastern Indonesia.

Monkeys gather along this heavily traveled roadway to accept food from passing motorists, and the researchers wanted to know what factors made some monkeys more inclined to interact with humans and how those interactions affected the group as a whole.

In particular, the researchers wanted to know whether social relationships influenced the amount of time some monkeys spent along the road and how traits like age and sex contributed to those decisions.

“It’s a bit like the old saying that goes, ‘If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?’” said Kristen Morrow, a doctoral student in anthropology at UGA and lead author of the study. “Yes, there is a food reward associated with humans, but this is risky behavior, and wild monkeys like these are generally very cautious around humans. So, we wanted to know how this behavior impacts their community.”

In general, the researchers found that male macaques were more likely to take the risk of approaching humans, who commonly offered the monkeys bread, fruit, potato chips and other processed foods.

They also found that macaques who have greater influence within the community of monkeys would visit the roadside more frequently.

While this regular proximity to humans may have resulted in a food reward, it also disrupted normal social behaviors that are typical of these macaques in the forest farther away from humans.

“When the monkeys were along the road there were fewer social connections between individuals. This change can reduce the opportunities for positive interactions, such as grooming one another or resting nearby one another,” Morrow said. “These are important behaviors, because they serve as a foundation for social learning and relationship building that lead to a strong, cohesive community.”