Animal Behaviour and Cognition

This article provides arguments through case studies across the world on how culture can be a great determinant of human-wildlife coexistence

The article chronicles the multifaceted relations between the Adivasi( Tea Tribe) community and the wild Asian elephants in the Udalguri district of Assam, India 

The article chronicles the multifaceted relations between the Adivasi( Tea Tribe) community and the wild Asian elephants in the Udalguri district of Assam, India 

In this chapter, we reflect on our readings of female / feminist primatologists’ studies of female primates and our understandings of the gendered lives of bonnet macaques, a female-bonded nonhuman primate species, endemic to peninsular India. These two focal points provide us with insights into the complexities of individual identity in nonhuman societies and the situatedness of human and other-than- human gender identities in their lived worlds.

Nonhuman primates – mostly apes – are known to combine gestural units in non-random ways, but they do not make novel meaning with these combinations. In this paper, we investigated, for the first time, the structure and functions of gesture sequences in the naturally occurring communication of wild bonnet macaques, using analyses akin to ape gesture studies. We discuss our findings in the light of a possibility that primate gesture sequences, coordinating the flow of social interactions, may be evolutionary precursors to pragmatic gestures in human language.

The renowned seismologists C.P. Rajendran and Kusala Rajendran offer a riveting story of the Indian earthquakes, their science, history and impact. Like all other natural phenomena, earthquakes are part of life-sustaining forces-- the creators of the mountains, valleys and springs or even deserts on Earth-- a theatre where the show never ends.

The book takes the readers to some exciting parts of India to show how earthquakes change the topography where a sea existed not far in the past-- now a salt marsh, affecting the social life, trade and livelihood. The book discusses the likelihood of the next big earthquake in the Himalayas against the backdrop of the devastating earlier ones revealed by archaeology, history and geology. It probes the causes and aftermath of the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and gives a glimpse of the past.

The high-impact earthquakes will happen, but they need not always end up as human catastrophes. The authors have spent much of their professional lives studying the earthquakes in India and abroad. They tell us from their vast experience how to negotiate the impacts of earthquakes and related hazards by following science-based strategies.

This paper attempts to theorize from two peripheries within the Indian ‘knowledge production nexus’: one which is spatial vis-à-vis a ‘peripheral’ city; and the other which is relational vis-à-vis more-than-human relations in the city. Drawing from Southern and postcolonial urban theory and more-than-human geographies, we postulate that first, the city of Guwahati in North-East India remains a ‘South within the South’ as a site to theorize from, and second, the everyday enmeshed lives and relations of animals within this landscape remain negligible within the above-mentioned discursive nexus. In a parallel enquiry over ‘other Souths’ and ‘other lifeforms’, we explore animals’ geographies in Guwahati, finding potential in the framing of ‘entanglements’ to encapsulate varied relations with pigs, rhesus macaques, bovines, and dogs – both historically and in the contemporary. More-than-human entanglements, we contend, unveil more-than-human material, spatial, and liminal relations in the city, striated along economic, gender, caste, and class lines. Such a framing is both located and dislocated, suggestive of a comparative analytic and a plural ethic.

In modern India, beginning from their role as war animals, domesticated elephants have come a long way, contributing in various ways to the socioeconomic development and public life of different communities across the Indian subcontinent. In this paper, we briefly trace the unique history of mahoutry in Kerala and discuss the unique nature of this interspecies relationship in two communities, the Malayalis of Kerala and the Malasar of the Anamalai hills in the Western Ghats mountains, reflecting on the widely differing nature of the husbandry practices that have traditionally forged elephant–human relations across southern India.

Hiristor and Mak, two rurban male Asian elephants, culturally more synurbised than their forest counterparts, traverse a production landscape – once a forest but now teeming with people and infrastructure – in southern India, trying to come to terms with their newly lived spaces and the novel experiences driving them. A complex interplay of space, knowledge, and capabilities has created a new generation of ‘outlier’ elephants, who have no option but to develop novel, potentially adaptive, behavioural strategies to live alongside humans. This rapid synanthropisation of the elephant populations of peninsular India, we suggest, requires an urgent realisation of the latent capabilities of both people and elephants to enable their peaceful, but vital, coexistence in the troubled times of the Anthropocene.

The behavioural relations between humans and wild Asian elephants at the forest-farmland interfaces are both political and affective, and these stem from the spatio-temporal ordering of land and livelihoods, which, in turn, emanate from power negotiations between different actors, both human and nonhuman. We study how the embodied encounters between humans and wild elephants in northeastern India, manifest through the interpersonal flow of affects, shape the political decisions related to their coexistence and shared lifeworlds, and propose gender as an entry point to understand these connections closely, at least from the human perspective.

Frugivorous primates in temperate and subtropical regions often experience a shortage or complete absence of fruits for several months of the year. In this paper, we report the winter foraging ecology of a group of stump-tailed macaques Macaca arctoides, a species considered to be vulnerable, in one of its last lowland rainforest refuges in northeastern India, during a period when the abundance of fruits was low.

A unique piscine behaviour—collection and temporary storage of food materials inside the mouth during times of availability and particularly in response to starvation—has been reported in a single species, the climbing perch Anabas testudineus. In this study, we documented a significant variation in the amount of food collected by populations of climbing perch inhabiting different ecological regimes, kole paddy fields, canals and water channels in coconut plantations, after experiencing starvation for two different periods of 24 and 48 h. Our results revealed a significant flexibility in this unique behaviour, depending on the ecological conditions and hunger experienced by the individuals.

In this study we showed that a freshwater fish, the climbing perch (Anabas testudineus) is incapable of using chemical communication but employs visual cues to acquire familiarity and distinguish a familiar group of conspecifics from an unfamiliar one. Moreover, the isolation of olfactory signals from visual cues did not affect the recognition and preference for a familiar shoal in this species.

Attitudinal differences toward wildlife have important implications for conflict management and when the species in question have strong cultural and religious associations, conflict mitigation becomes a challenging endeavor. We investigated farmers’ attitudes toward two different crop-raiding macaque species, the rhesus macaque in northern India, and the bonnet macaque in southern India. Apart from regional differences in attitudes, we also assessed temporal changes in attitude toward the rhesus macaque. We carried out household surveys using a semistructured questionnaire to collect data. Our findings reveal that respondents in southern and northern India differ significantly in their views regarding species sanctity and preference for mitigation options. Although people’s perceptions of the rhesus macaques had changed over time in northern India, farmers were still unwilling to cause harm to the macaques. We discuss the underlying causes of these observed differences in attitude and their impact on the management of human–macaque conflict.

This volume brings together the primary challenges for 21st century cognitive sciences and cultural neuroscience in responding to the nature of human identity, self, and evolution of life itself. Through chapters devoted to intricate but focused models, empirical findings, theories, and experiential data, the contributors reflect upon the most exciting possibilities, and debate upon the fundamental aspects of consciousness and self in the context of cultural, philosophical, and multidisciplinary divergences and convergences. Such an understanding and the ensuing insights lie in the cusp of philosophy, neurosciences, psychiatry, and medical humanities. In this volume, the editors and contributors explore the foundations of human thinking and being and discuss both evolutionary/cultural embeddedness, and the self-orientation, of consciousness, keeping in mind questions that bring in the interdisciplinary complexity of issues such as the emergence of consciousness, relation between healing and agency, models of altered self, how cognition impacts the social self, experiential primacy as the hallmark of consciousness, and alternate epistemologies to understand these interdisciplinary puzzles.

Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) is a major challenge for conservation biologists worldwide. To counter negative attitudes of people towards wildlife species, government agencies or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) frequently provide monetary compensation for losses due to crop damage or livestock depredation by wildlife. While much has been written about the challenges of using compensation schemes as a wildlife conservation tool, there has been little investigation into alternative potential benefits of compensation records. We suggest that compensation records can be used to obtain a summary overview of wildlife conflict instances that occur in a region and thereby provide an understanding of the distribution of HWC across a landscape. Further, these records provide insights on the economic prioritization given to each of the species involved in HWC and the kind of damage they cause. We tested this premise through a case study of human-elephant conflict (HEC) in districts of Kerala in southern India using state government-maintained compensation records. To this end, we constructed a conflict index and found Wayanad, Palakkad, and Kannur to be the districts most affected by HEC. An overall distribution map of HEC in any region is crucial to formulating mitigation policies for conflict management. Findings from our study, based on the compensation records, present a holistic view of conflict occurrences in Kerala and thus provide data that can be used to develop basic management strategies for HEC in the state.

This first-of-a-kind volume provides a snapshot of existing science communication policy and practice in India across different S&T sectors, and offers solutions to building effective communication. It provides an understanding on how to avoid societal clashes in situations when science meets the public in these sectors. The editors and contributors argue that effective S&T communication leads not only to a more informed public but also benefits research itself, and in a changing society like India this is a crucial element related to good governance and policy making. In this volume, experienced masters of the craft provide practical solutions to making S&T communication more effective in a vast democracy like India, which has complex issues related to literacy levels, diverse languages, varying political will, reach, and resources. Through, discussions on cases of creating information modules for the public on the Internet, television and radio, social media, as well as traditional ways of outreach like people’s science movements, holding popular science events, and fairs, the volume provides highly valuable directions on how developing countries with low resources and complex populations can communicate S&T research to the public and bridge communication gaps. 

This volume will interest researchers from science, social science, mass communication and public relations departments, journalists, as well as practitioners and policy makers from government and non-government institutions involved in S&T policy, practice and communication and people who want to understand the complex S&T landscape of India.

The chapter talks about how people ‘read’ wild elephants’ lives affectively to engage with both elephant and human lives.

The lion-tailed macaque is an endangered species, endemic to the Western Ghats of southern India. In this paper, we provide evidence for the emigration of an entire troop of the species out of a forest fragment into nearby human settlements, leading to the inclusion of areas completely devoid of natural vegetation into the core home range of the troop. 

The lion-tailed macaque is an endangered species, endemic to the Western Ghats of southern India. In this paper, we provide evidence for the emigration of an entire troop of the species out of a forest fragment into nearby human settlements, leading to the inclusion of areas completely devoid of natural vegetation into the core home range of the troop. 

Nonhuman individuals and groups, living in anthropogenic landscapes, often adopt adaptive foraging strategies, mediated by their day-to-day interactions with humans and their artefacts. In this study, employing field experiments, we investigated an example of human-induced, extractive foraging behavior – the extraction of liquid contents from plastic bottles – in a synurbic bonnet macaque Macaca radiata population. The main aims of the study were to examine the distribution, diversity, inter-individual variability and intra-individual flexibility of bottle-directed manipulative behaviors, and to explore the social and environmental factors driving this behavioral practice. 

Nonhuman individuals and groups, living in anthropogenic landscapes, often adopt adaptive foraging strategies, mediated by their day-to-day interactions with humans and their artefacts. In this study, employing field experiments, we investigated an example of human-induced, extractive foraging behavior – the extraction of liquid contents from plastic bottles – in a synurbic bonnet macaque Macaca radiata population. The main aims of the study were to examine the distribution, diversity, inter-individual variability and intra-individual flexibility of bottle-directed manipulative behaviors, and to explore the social and environmental factors driving this behavioral practice. 

This preliminary study has investigated the potential presence of self-awareness in a population of wild Adeìlie penguins in East Antarctica on the basis of responses and reactions of individual penguins to images, generated in mirrors, using three experimental paradigms. These appear to be the first investigations into the potential presence of self-awareness in any penguin species in their natural environment, without any prior familiarisation, conditioning or acclimatisation to the experimental paradigms employed.

Reminiscences of three decades of my research on bonnet macaques, "the performing monkey of south India" 

The article discusses people's perspective of wetland degradation due to (mal)development practices and its impact on their livelihoods and life. The study is located at a peri-urban wetland in the Lower Gangetic floodplains

The article discusses the gendered implications of living close to wild Asian elephants and how gender mainstreaming in conservation practice can streamline decolonised conservation

Tool use and manufacture by wild nonhuman primates in nonforaging contexts — an important indicator of their technical intelligence — is widespread across taxa, but is sporadic in occurrence, usually being displayed by one or a few individuals within a population and typically occurring in four contexts: aggression, communication and sexual display, hygiene, and in the modification of the environment. In this review, considering the relative rarity of nonforaging tool use in the wild, we recommend the development of standardised methodologies for long-term data collection under natural conditions and the establishment of novel experimental paradigms to conduct comparative studies on captive primates. 

This is a book review of Tigers Are Our Brothers: Anthropology of Wildlife Conservation in Northeast India, authored by Dr. Ambika Aiyadurai. The review discusses the key themes and takeaways from the book.

In this chapter, we assess the impacts of such transformations on the lives of India’s largest land mammal, the Asian elephant and discuss the adaptations displayed by this species to human-induced change, with a particular focus on how the successful exploitation of rurban agricultural resources has allowed for the appearance of spatially and temporally flexible behavioural innovations that, in turn, have impacted the life-history strategies of a threatened elephant population in a peri-urban region of southern India

This study highlights the importance of understanding behavioural changes displayed by animals in response to human interactions; such knowledge could be crucial for the planning and implementation of management and conservation strategies for endangered species such as the lion-tailed macaque and possibly other wildlife in the increasingly anthropogenic landscapes of the tropical world.

To survive and persist in fragmented, human-dominated landscapes, especially in the Anthropocene, elephants often need to modify their behavior. In this chapter, using empirical data, the authors assess the behavioral adaptability of elephants, as determined by their innate biological variables, such as age, sex, and grouping patterns at the population level, and discuss the impacts of global climatic changes on the behavior and distribution of Asian elephants, as evidenced through their own studies. 

This study investigated factors related to people’s choice of conflict mitigation strategies against commensal monkey species in two regions in india.

Many piscine species form fission-fusion societies where decisions to leave or join a shoal are influenced by factors such as shoal size, familiarity and species. Individuals exhibit distinct shoaling preferences based on behavioural traits such as boldness and sociability. In this study, we examined the link between shoaling decisions and behavioural traits in a hatchery reared population of an endangered megafish, the Deccan mahseer (Tor khudree). We found that this fish exhibits preference for larger shoals when presented with choices of 2 vs 4 and 2 vs 8 shoal sizes. However, no preference for isolated familiar or unfamiliar conspecifics over invasive heterospecifics was observed. Moreover, individual shoaling preferences did not correlate with their boldness or sociability. These results suggest that juvenile hatchery reared mahseers reintroduced into natural habitats may shoal with invasive species and modifying their social behaviour by amending rearing practices could improve outcomes of restocking interventions.

This paper proposes a practical framework to assess the spatial reliability of frugivores as seed dispersers and posits that it is essential to maintain viable populations of macaques across their range and keep human interventions at a minimum to ensure that they continue to reliably disperse the seeds of a broad range of plant species in the Anthropocene. It further suggests that this framework be used for assessing the spatial reliability of other taxonomic groups as seed dispersers.

Although animals are the primary focus of studies in human-animal studies (HAS), very few ethologists engage with this discipline. Insights from HAS can help provide a deeper and richer understanding of animal behaviour and humananimal interactions. HAS perspectives regarding animal and human spaces, the sociozoological scale theory, and the concepts of animal agency and intersubjectivity in human-animal interactions help demystify puzzling aspects of human-wildlife conflict scenarios and impel a re-examination of ethological dictums and methodologies. We argue that inputs from human-animal studies will aid in the growth of ethology.

The authors have studied the attitudes and perceptions of forest department personnel regarding the management of human-rhesus macaque conflict (HRMC) in Himachal Pradesh, northern India.

In this commentary, authors identified challenges and opportunities at human-primate interfaces in light of COVID-19, focusing on examples from Asia, and make recommendations for researchers working with wild primates to reduce zoonosis risk and leverage research opportunities.

This study deals with human-wildlife conflict in the form of crop-and livestockdepredation and exploits Conditioned Taste Aversion (CTA) strategy, a non-lethal and effective method to control crop damage caused by vertebrate pests, to reduce crop damage.

In this chapter, using empirical data, the authors assess the behavioural adaptability of elephants, as determined by their innate biological variables, such as age, sex and grouping patterns at the population level. They also discuss the impacts of global climatic changes on the behaviour and distribution of Asian elephants, as evidenced through studies conducted on these aspects.

The present study explored the relationships between the personality traits boldness, activity, exploration, and sociability, and lateralized utilisation of brain hemispheres in the hatchery-reared juveniles of Deccan Mahseer (Tor khudree), an endangered megafish inhabiting the rivers of central and southern India.

Increasing anthropogenic pressures has led to the fragmentation of Asian elephant habitats, affecting their numbers, demography and ranging patterns across their range. Baseline information on the demography and population dynamics of free-ranging Asian elephants is often unavailable. Population monitoring at the landscape level has many constraints, including those of visibility, habitat, terrain and field logistics, among several others. While knowing elephant numbers may be important for managing local populations, demographic parameters and distribution patterns are perhaps more crucial to ascertain long-term trends for conservation.

This study examines the extent and nature of harvest of non-timber forest products (NTFP) by local human communities residing adjacent to the Hollongapar Gibbon Sanctuary in the Upper Brahmaputra Valley of Assam, northeastern India.

This study presented two case studies—the Jigokudani Monkey Park, Japan, and the Telaga Warna Nature Recreational Park, Indonesia—where the authors provided quantitative assessments of people’s motivations for visiting managed (monkey parks) and unmanaged (incidental) monkey tourism sites. They further showed that management regimes, socio-demographic attributes, previous experience of interactions with macaques, and feeding them play a role in people’s desire to visit macaque tourism sites.

In this chapter, the authors investigated the affective ethnographies of non/humans and delineate what this offers for an understanding of animals’ geographies or the sentient lives of animals within wider social and political ecological contexts.

This paper discusses mental health ecologies in different registers: subjectivity being environmental, its scale being relational rather than binary, enmeshed in the dynamics of other-than-human life, and involving conversations between medical and vernacular practices rather than hierarchies of knowledge.

In this chapter, using empirical data, the authors assess the behavioural adaptability of elephants, as determined by their innate biological variables, such as age, sex and grouping patterns at the population level. They also discuss the impacts of global climatic changes on the behaviour and distribution of Asian elephants, as evidenced through studies conducted on these aspects. They discuss how elephants, in general, avoid areas of high human use.

This study is conducted in a biodiversity hotspot in southern India to examine the knowledge level of rural school children regarding the mammalian species in their region. The results of the study showed that school children were able to recognize regional mammalian species that are publicized by media sources, but had little knowledge about their conservation status or more significant information about them.

This report was prepared in response to the Forest Advisory Committee’s (FAC) recommendation to conduct “a multiple seasonal replicate study on biodiversity assessment” of the 3097 MW Etalin Hydro Electric Project (HEP) in Dibang Valley, Arunachal Pradesh. The review has found that the study was conducted in under five five months from February to June 2018 and cannot be considered as a ‘multiple seasonal replicate’ study as it does not represent three seasons in Arunachal Pradesh.