| Abstrak/Abstract |
A long developmental period in animals is often needed to learn skills for adult reproduction and survival, including feeding behaviour. The nocturnal Javan slow loris, Nycticebus javanicus, is unusual in that
it consumes a specialized diet of difficult to extract resources, as well as disperses up to a year after
sexual maturity. Here, we examined the ontogeny of its feeding behaviour to understand whether
learning to feed on difficult resources, including by co-feeding, is related to delayed dispersal. We
collected feeding and proximity data on developing and adult wild slow lorises at a long-term field site in
Cipaganti, West Java from 2012 to 2018. To determine whether acquisition of insects, exudates, nectar
and flowers varied by age, we ran logistic generalized additive mixed models. We found that intake of
insects and exudates occurred significantly more in the early stages, and feeding on nectar significantly
more in the later stages, of development. Co-feeding occurred for all food types, with insects showing the
most co-feeding events during early development, and co-feeding on exudates remaining high
throughout development. Social learning via co-feeding is a potentially important factor in transmission
of dietary information from older individuals, including siblings and parents, to young slow lorises.
Differences between immature and adult diets levelled off after sexual maturity and before average
dispersal. Together these factors suggest that the period required to learn to forage on difficult items
could help explain the delayed dispersal patterns seen in mammals with similar foraging strategies.
© 2021 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. |
