Hoopes, Holly (Salt Lake Community College)
Faculty Advisor: Seaboch, Melissa (Salt Lake Community College, Anthropology)
Documenting primate sleep sites is a useful way to census troop composition because recording the troop's arrival to and dispersal from a sleep site can offer a better understanding of the whole troop, especially for species that are fission-fusion foragers. My goal was to understand sleep site selection by Alouatta palliata. Past studies suggest that howler monkeys (genus Alouatta) sleep in or near food-source trees. Alouatta species are the most folivorous of all Neotropical species with a preference for trees in the Moraceae family (e.g. Brosimum, Ficus). I predict Alouatta palliata will sleep most often in trees in the Moraceae family. This research took place at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica. La Selva consists of 1,600 ha with both primary and secondary forests. This research was conducted at the start of the wet season (May and June) in 2018. I followed A. palliata to their nightly sleep site and recorded the trees they were sleeping in, at the Family level. The Family of the tree was identified with the use of the online OTS Plant Database in combination with the physical samples in the herbarium archives. I was able to record 27 nocturnal sleep sites with a total of 47 trees used for sleeping. Of the 47 trees, 18 were in the Fabaceae family (38%) and 11 were in the Moraceae family (23%). They also slept in Myristicaceae, (4%) and Malvaceae trees (2%). Fifteen sleeping trees were unidentified. Thus, my hypothesis that howler monkeys would sleep most in Moraceae, was refuted. However, Fabaceae trees are a commonly known food resource for howler monkeys, so my results are similar to prior research which found they sleep in or near food-source trees. Interestingly, I never observed them eating in the trees in which they slept.