Human-wildlife encounters are becoming increasingly frequent across the globe, often leading people to interact with and feed wild animals and impacting animal behaviour and ecology. Although the nature of human-wildlife interactions has been well documented across a number of species, we still have limited understanding as to why some individual animals interact more frequently with humans than others. Additionally, we lack a comprehensive understanding of how these interactions influence animal social networks. Using behavioural data from a group of moor macaque monkeys (Macaca maura), we used permutation-based linear regression analyses to understand how life history and social network factors jointly explain interindividual variation in tendency to interact with humans along a provincial road in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. As our study group spent only a portion of their time in proximity to humans, we also examined how social network structure changes in response to human presence by comparing social networks in the forest to those along the road. We found that sex, individual network position, and associate network position interact in complex ways to influence individual behaviour. Individual variation in tendency to be along the road caused social networks to become less cohesive when in proximity to humans. This study demonstrates that nuanced intragroup analyses are necessary to fully understand and address conservation issues relating to human-wildlife interactions.

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Whole-plant development trajectories and sapling leaf displays were compared for two sympatric congeneric species, Pterospermum diversifolium and P. javanicum, in a tropical floodplain forest in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. We assessed their growth strategies and developed hypotheses for their coexistence within the community. Pterospermum diversifolium retains a monoaxial growth habit that promotes quick stem elongation; thus, it is taller when branches are initiated than is P. javanicum. The species differed significantly in height growth and total crown expansion per unit increment of biomass: monoaxial P. diversifolium saplings devote more effort to stem elongation, whereas branched P. javanicum saplings devote more effort to branch expansion. Monoaxial P. diversifolium sustained more severe self-shading than P. javanicum. The sapling growth strategy of P. diversifolium appears to be dynamic, emphasizing the opportunistic use of light following a disturbance, whereas that of P. javanicum appears to be static, optimizing leaf display for current light conditions. The advantages of these strategies depend on context, and the two species may coexist within a community by adopting different regeneration niches based on differing understory light conditions: P. diversifolium is favored over P. javanicum at high light levels, but the opposite is true at low light levels.

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Researchers are increasingly documenting the existence of social tolerance and affiliative behavior among primate males, including in male-dispersing species. We investigated the nature of male social relationships in a relatively understudied macaque species, the moor macaque (Macaca maura), in order to expand our knowledge of male social relationships in male dispersing primates. The classification of social styles for primates rests largely on data about female social relationships. Therefore, by providing data on male–male relationships, we also contribute to our understanding of social style variation within the genus Macaca. Observations were conducted on a wild yet well-habituated group in Bantimurung-Bulusaraung National Park in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. We collected focal animal and ad libitum data on four adult males, recording social behavior during 209 contact hours over two field seasons in 2010 and 2011. The adult male moor macaques in this study did not interact frequently. Interactions that did occur more frequently involved affiliation rather than aggression, with greetings being the most common form of interaction. Greetings occurred in a predominately neutral context and were more common between specific males with uncertain or ambiguous dominance relationships and low-quality relationships, but the initiation of greetings was not linked to dominance rank. These results suggest that greetings enable males to communicate information about their willingness to invest in the relationship, representing one way for adult males to ease social tension and build social bonds. To expand our understanding of social style variation in Macaca, we compared our data to those published for other macaque taxa. In the present study, the observed pattern of aggression (i.e., low rate, low to moderate intensity and high symmetry) was consistent with the species’ social style classification as highly tolerant. The relatively low grooming rate and low percentage of counteraggression, however, were more consistent with the social style of less tolerant taxa. Further research is needed to determine what factors explain this pattern of social tolerance among male moor macaques.