Experimental condition
We selected three groups of bonnet macaques from a set of 24 groups
located around the city of Mysore, India (Erinjery et al., 2015) based
on their exposure to anthropogenic packaged food (Bull temple
group-High, Foot hill group-Moderate, T. Betahalli group-Low). Based on
home range, habitats of the 3 groups could be also classified along the
urban dimension based on built up area in the following manner: Bull
temple group-Urban (>50% built-up area), Foot hill
group-Semi urban (10-50% built up area) and T. Betahalli
group-Rural/Natural (>10% built up area). All the groups
have been under intermittent monitoring for over 25 years and hence
their feeding ecology and access to sources of artificial enclosed food
was adequately known (see Dhananjaya et al. (2021) for details on study
groups). We offered an extractable food item, peanut (native form with
intact shell) on terrestrial substratum to isolated and passive macaques
and recorded their use of hand/mouth to acquire peanut and to process
peanut (see Dhananjaya et al. (2021) for detailed experimental design).
The experiment was conducted in three phases involving a single group in
each phase and behavioral responses were recorded using camcorders (Sony
DCR-SX21, Sony DCR-DVD 650 and Sony HDR-CX405).