纪录片是许多人观察野生灵长类动物行为的主要手段。通过影响外行人对野生灵长类动物的感知,纪录片可能会影响观众与保护相关的信念和行为,因此,野生灵长类动物的健康。为了调查这样的描述,我们研究了描述纪录片中表现最多的四个物种的纪录片:恒河猴,黑猩猩,环尾狐猴,和山地大猩猩。对于每一部纪录片,我们不断编码行为,每隔3分钟对年龄-性别类别进行扫描样本,并随意观察不准确和误导性内容。我们预计纪录片中年龄性别类别和活动预算的表示将与原始文献中针对野外相同物种的报道不同。此外,我们预计每个物种的描述都不准确。对于环尾狐猴来说,成年男性在纪录片中的代表性不足。对于猕猴来说,黑猩猩,大猩猩,年龄-性别类别的代表与野外观察结果没有显着差异.对活动预算的文献描述与研究人员对恒河猴野生灵长类动物行为的描述不同,黑猩猩,和山地大猩猩,但不是环尾狐猴。总的来说,纪录片夸大了旅行和社交行为,如玩耍和打扮。纪录片,尤其是docudramas,可能强调旅行,因为这样的镜头允许故事情节叙述,而对社会行为的强调可能是由于这些镜头对观众的吸引力。所有四个物种都有不准确的记录,恒河猴最不准确。我们建议灵长类动物学家在道德上必须提高灵长类动物对观众的描绘的准确性。
Documentaries are the primary means by which many people observe the behavior of wild primates. By influencing layperson perceptions of wild primates, documentaries could impact viewer conservation-related beliefs and behaviors and, therefore, the well-being of wild primates. To investigate such portrayals, we examined documentaries depicting the four species that were most represented in documentaries: rhesus macaque, chimpanzee, ring-tailed lemur, and mountain gorilla. For each documentary, we continuously coded behavior, conducted scan samples of age-sex classes at 3-min intervals, and made ad libitum observations of inaccuracies and misleading content. We expected that representation of age-sex classes and activity budgets in documentaries would differ from those reported in the primary literature for the same species in the wild. In addition, we expected inaccurate depictions for every species. For ring-tailed lemurs, adult males were underrepresented in documentaries. For macaques, chimpanzees, and gorillas, representation of age-sex classes did not differ significantly from observations in the wild. Documentary depictions of activity budgets differed from researcher accounts of wild primate behavior for rhesus macaques, chimpanzees, and mountain gorillas, but not for ring-tailed lemurs. In general, documentaries overrepresented traveling and social behaviors such as play and grooming. Documentaries, especially docudramas, may have emphasized traveling because such footage allows storyline narration, whereas the emphasis on social behavior was likely due to the appeal of such footage to audiences. Inaccuracies were documented for all four species, with rhesus macaques having the most inaccuracies. We propose that primatologists have an ethical imperative to enhance the accuracy of primate portrayals to audiences.