Primate Responses to Changing Environments in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Most primate habitats are undergoing intense and rapid changes due to anthropogenic influences resulting in many primate populations being threatened. Habitat loss and fragmentation are already extensive; thus dispersal to unoccupied habitats is an unlikely adaptive response to these changes. Furthermore, most primates have slow life histories and long generation times, and because environmental change is occurring at an unprecedented rate, gene-based adaptations are also unlikely to evolve fast enough to offer successful responses to these changes. However, long primate life histories are linked to well-developed brains, which may allow primates to respond to environmental change through behavioural flexibility. Here we ask: What are the most common challenges of changing environments for primates and what do we know about their behavioural abilities to respond to such changes? To answer this question, we first review the most common types of habitat/landscape alterations, the extent of human-primate interactions, and the impact of climate change. Next, we evaluate how primates respond to these changes via behavioural flexibility, and using different approaches and datasets, we discuss how to investigate if these responses are beneficial with regard to population persistence. Finally, we discuss how comparisons across species, space, and time can be used to draw generalizations about primate responses to environmental change while considering their behavioural flexibility and the data derived from case studies. We demonstrate how understanding behavioural flexibility as a response to environmental change will be crucial to optimize conservation efforts by constructing informed management plans.