Ethnoecology, Resource Use, Conservation And Development In A ...

studies. The proportion of food items recorded for single species in this study, for
which the consumption of related species has been reported from ecological studies,
was calculated at the levels of the family and genus. Levels of correspondence thus
calculated for individual animal species ranged from 73-95 percent (88 percent
overall) for correspondences at the family level, and 28-81 percent (49 percent) at
the generic level. The ecological data currently available does not allow a more
complete assessment of the ethnoecological data on diet. I have already noted the
effect of the geographical discrepancy among study locations. Additionally, much of
the reported ecological data is incomplete, and dietary studies in which food lists are
both comprehensive and fully identified are rare. The single example of a species
whose feeding ecology has been the subject of a detailed, multi-year study at a site
reasonably close to the present one is Ateles paniscus. It seems significant that the
recorded diet of this species shows the highest level of overlap of any with data
recorded in the present study, at both familial and generic levels. As far as can be
inferred from the published data, then, it appears that information on diet is accurate.
However, further comparison with the published literature shows that it is far from
comprehensive.
The dietary data collected in the present study includes lists of food plants far
shorter than those in many of the conventional studies cited. Among the primates,
numbers of fruits recorded to be eaten in ecological studies of Ateles paniscus,
Alouatta seniculus and Cebus apella were all far greater than in the present study.
Numbers of food plants for Chiropotes satanas and Pithecia pithecia were
comparable, but in these cases the lists in the ecological literature are incomplete.
The number of fruits reported to be eaten by Tapirus terrestris in this study was
comparable with that of Salas and Fuller (1996), but the latter is based on a short-
term study supplemented by ethnoecological data, and thus may be expected to
reproduce any shortcomings exhibited by the data set of the present study.
The discrepancy between the two data sets is even greater when other
categories of food are considered. The present study recorded the identities of only
one species of leaf consumed by each of Ateles paniscus, Alouatta seniculus and
Tapirus terrestris, compared to 28, 98 and 88 species respectively reported in the
literature (Roosmalen 1985b: 74; Julliot and Sabatier 1993: 536; Salas and Fuller
1996: 47). Other food categories such as flowers and invertebrate foods appear to
be similarly clumped, although in the ecological literature, for the latter at least, the
difficulty of field identification often lead to the same result (e.g., Freese and
Oppenheimer 1981: 345). In some senses the ethnoecological data is constrained by