Black-and-white snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus bieti) feeding behavior in a degraded forest fragment: clues to a stressed population

Abstract

Rapid global deforestation has forced many of the world's primates to live in fragmented habitats, making the understanding of their behavioral responses to degraded and fragmented habitats a key challenge for their future protection and management. The black-and-white snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus bieti) is an endangered species endemic to southwest China. The forest habitat ranges from near-continuous to fragmented. In this study, we investigated the activity budget and diet of a R. bieti population that live in an isolated and degraded habitat patch at Mt. Lasha in Yunnan Province, near the current southern limit of the species. We used our data along with data from six other sites in more-continuous habitats across its range to model factors that predict stress, including feeding effort and time feeding on lichens against potential predictive parameters. Models showed feeding effort across all sites increased with increasing altitude and latitude, and with decreasing food species diversity. There was also a strong positive relationship between feeding effort and time feeding lichens. The Mt. Lasha R. bieti population exploited a total of 36 food species, spending 80.2% of feeding time feeding on lichens, Bryoria spp. and Usnea longissima. These figures are more comparable to those living in the north than those living in the mid- and southern part of the species' range. Given the models for feeding effort and time feeding on lichens, the unexpectedly high time spend feeding on lichens and feeding effort relative to latitude and elevation are suggestive of a stressed population at Mt. Lasha.

A heuristic‐based approach to mitigating positional errors in patrol data for species distribution modeling

“…From lower elevation to higher elevation, the vegetation transitions from deciduous broadleaved forest to dark conifer forest with mixed deciduous conifer forest in between. Several fire‐induced forest clearings were present throughout the area (Huang, ; Huang et al, ).…”

Extensive variability in the gut microbiome of a highly‐specialized and critically endangered lemur species across sites

“…However, the ability to incorporate novel foods likely depends on habitat, severity of disturbance, and the species' degree of specialty. Accordingly, negative consequences of habitat disturbance on diet have been described in Propithecus edwardsii (Arrigo‐Nelson, ; Matos, ), Rhinopithecus bieti (Huang et al, ), Hylobates lar and Presbytis melalophos (Johns, ), Ateles geoffroyi (Chaves, Stoner, & Arroyo‐Rodríguez, ), and Alouatta palliata (Asensio, Cristobal‐Azkarate, Dias, Vea, & Rodríguez‐Luna, ; Dunn, Cristóbal‐Azkarate, & Veà, ), all of which show reduced dietary diversity and increased foraging effort in smaller, more degraded forests.…”

New distribution records for the endangered black-and-white snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus bieti) in Yunnan, China

“…Nevertheless, most of the available habitats for the two groups are located near to the boundaries of the nature reserves, which are areas of frequent human activity and adjacent to areas where large expanses of forest have been destroyed in the wake farmland and alpine meadow expansion (Xiao et al 2003. Although these two R. bieti groups can respond to human disturbance and habitat destruction by avoiding disturbance, becoming habituated to some disturbance, and adapting to a specializing diet (Huang et al 2017), occasional migration and gene exchange between groups might have been prevented due to the isolated nature of the fragmented habitats, and given the small group sizes, they are considered to be very vulnerable to extinction due to future environmental change. Moreover, monkeys quickly escape in response to the researchers, which indicates that monkeys are frequently disturbed by human activities and the current habitat quality may be far from optimal.…”

“…Establishment of nature reserves as an in situ conservation strategy is considered the most effective approach for protecting rare species and local biodiversity (Li et al 2016), and several nature reserves have been established in Yunnan and Tibet since 1983 to protect this endangered primate. In response, the group size of some R. bieti groups have shown an increase in past years, such as Lasha and Longma groups in southern unit, the group size has increased from 50 to 130 during 1988 and 2004, and from 50 to 127 during 1988 and 2015, respectively (Long et al 1994, Li et al 2014, Xu et al 2015, Huang et al 2017. However, in the monkeys' southernmost distribution range, the high-quality habitats are currently limited in size, highly fragmented, and disturbed by urbanization, roads, grazing, farmland and firewood collection of local people (Clauzel et al 2015.…”