What GPS trackers reveal about Cape Town's baboon troop movements

In this study, Anna Bracken, who recently completed her PhD at Swansea University in Wales, used GPS technology to research the collective behaviour of chacma baboons in an urban area.

- Anna Bracken

FAST FACTS

The presence of cities can alter patterns of risk and reward, and therefore change the behaviour of animals in the wild.

The aim of the study was to determine whether a baboon troop’s collective behaviour changes in urban spaces, a factor that might make them easier to manage in cities.

Understanding the behaviour of chacma baboons is essential for reducing human-animal conflict.

Many animals form groups. Living in a group can protect individuals from predators, reducing risk; it also helps them to find more food, increasing rewards. However, the presence of cities can alter these patterns of risk and reward. When wildlife enters urban space, there’s the potential for the way that individuals behave in groups (their ‘collective behaviour’) to be drastically altered.

Until recently, scientists have known little about the collective behaviour of wild animals, because it’s difficult to observe many individuals at once. Even less is known about wild animals’ collective behaviour in human-changed environments because the physical structure of urban spaces makes observations even harder.

In Cape Town in the Western Cape, wild chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) regularly visit urban spaces in search of high-energy human foods. This can result in negative interactions between humans and baboons, as well as high levels of baboon injury and mortality caused by electric fences, cars, dogs and shooting with pellet guns. The City of Cape Town contracts a private company that employs teams of ‘baboon rangers’ to herd the baboons out of urban spaces in an effort to reduce these negative interactions.