2004 Trade-offs in Skill Acquisition and Time Allocation among Juvenile Chacma Baboons. Human Nature 15:45–62

We hypothesize that juvenile baboons are less efficient foragers than adult baboons owing to their small size, lower level of knowledge and skill, and/or lesser ability to maintain access to resources. We predict that as re-sources are more difficult to extract, juvenile baboons will demonstrate lower efficiency than adults will because of their lower levels of experi-ence. In addition, we hypothesize that juvenile baboons will be more likely to allocate foraging time to easier-to-extract resources owing to their greater efficiency in acquiring those resources. We use feeding efficiency and time allocation data collected on a wild, free-ranging, non-provisioned population of chacma baboons (Papio hamadryas ursinus) in the Moremi Wildlife Reserve, Okavango Delta, Botswana to test these hypotheses. The major findings of this study are: 1. Juvenile baboons are significantly less efficient foragers than adult baboons primarily for difficult-to-extract resources. We propose that this age-dependent variation in efficiency is due to dif-ferences in memory and other cognitive functions related to locating food resources, as is indicated by the greater amount of time juvenile baboons spend searching for food. There is no evidence that smaller body size or competitive disruption influences the differences in return rates found be-tween adult and juvenile baboons in this study. 2. An individual baboon’s feeding efficiency for a given resource can be used to predict the duration of its foraging bouts for that resource