Huaorani resource use in the Ecuadorian Amazon: Hunting, food sharing, and market participation

The Huaorani are an indigenous hunter-gatherer-horticulturalist group living in the Ecuadorian Amazon. I investigated hunting, food sharing, and market participation within two Huaorani communities, using an interdisciplinary approach combining human behavioral ecology, microeconomic theory, and conservation biology. Research was conducted in the communities of Guiyero and Dicaro, located on a private oil road within the Yasuni National Park and Biosphere Reserve. The primary objectives of my research were (1) to test theories of food sharing in two Huaorani communities, (2) to examine the relationship between intra-community sharing and extra-community trading, specifically of meat resources, and (3) to consider conservation implications of current patterns of resource use within the area.; Households in the two Huaorani communities differed markedly in their involvement in the market sale of bushmeat and their food sharing behavior. This variation allowed me to test competing evolutionary hypotheses for the maintenance of food sharing within traditional communities under different contexts. I designed the study to not only tease out the relative importance of the five principal hypothesized mechanisms maintaining food sharing (kin selection, reciprocal altruism/risk reduction, costly signaling and showing off, tolerated theft, and cooperative acquisition), but also to illustrate how market integration affects intra-community sharing.; I found the strongest support for reciprocal altruism as a primary motivation for food sharing among the Huaorani when contingency between households is measured in terms of the frequency of sharing. This was supported by evidence that households accurately perceive the sharing behavior of others in the community. However, there appear to be additional benefits to sharing in the community aside from risk reduction. This is demonstrated by the finding that households do not substitute sharing in the community with selling in the market. If risk reduction were the only benefit to sharing then households would be expected to trade meat for immediate compensation in the form of storable foods. Lastly, evidence was found for the local depletion of two primate species, the woolly monkey and spider monkey, and possibly the tapir. This is driven primarily by subsistence hunting rather than market hunting.