CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36, Number 5, December 1995 © 1995 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation fOl Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 00rr-320419513605-0004$3.00 Intraspecific Prey Choice by Amazonian Hunters l by Michael Alvard This paper tests the idea that subsistence hunters use selective intraspecific prey choice to increase the sustainability of their long-term harvest-in other words, to conserve. It is suggested that much of what has been considered conservation by native peoples is probably epiphenomenal. The misidentification of ap- parent conservation as genuine is a result of the focus on sus- tained harvests rather than on behaviors that not only aim at in- creasing the sustainability of the harvest in the long term but also are costly in the short term. Optimal foraging models are here used to generate alternative pledictions to those of conserva- tion. Data on the intraspecific prey choice of the Piro, subsis- tence hunters of the Peruvian Neotropics, indicate that they do not selectively choose sex and age types that minimize the im- pact on prey populations. Rather, their decisions are more closely predicted by optimal foraging theory. Evolutionary models do not, however, rule out conservation as a strategy for resource ac- quisition, and productive research may well follow from an exten- sion of the logic and the rigorous methodology of evolutionary ecology to the identification of true conservation and the con- texts in which it is an adaptive strategy. MICHAEL ALVARD is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo (Box 61005, Buffalo, N.Y. 14261-0005, U.S.A.). Born in 1959, he was educated at Colo- rado State University (B.A. 1984) and at the University of New Mexico (M.S., 1987; Ph.D., 19931. He has done fieldwork among the Piro and Machiguenga of Peru and is currently studying the impact of traditional hunting and trapping on prey species among the Wana of Sulawesi. He has published "A Test of the Ecologi- cally Noble Savage Hypothesis: Interspecific Prey Choice by Neo- tropical Hunters" (Human Ecology 21:355-78), "Prey Choice in a Depleted Habitat" (Human Nature 5:127-54), and "Shotguns and Sustainable Hunting in the Neotropics" (Oryx, in press). The present paper was submitted IO x 94 and accepted 19 XII 94; the final version reached the Editor's office 3 III 95. I. This research was funded by the Charles Lindbergh Foundation, the 1. S. B. Leakey Foundation, the Tinker Inter-American Re- search Foundation, the University of New Mexico, and the Na- tional Science Foundation (Grant BNS-87I7886 to Hillard Kaplan). I am grateful to Hillard Kaplan, Jane Lancaster, Jeff Long, Kent Redford, and William Vickers for helpful comments. I thank Teslin Phillips, Kate Kopischke, and Monica Gornikiewicz for assistance with data collection and especially my wife, Sharon Gursky, for encouragement, support, and critical comment. I am grateful to the Piro of Diamante for allowing me into their lives and taking me along on their hunts and to Alejandro Smith and Estefan Carpio and family for assistance in the field. It is commonly held that indigenous peoples strive to live in balance with their environments. While the meaning of "balance" or "harmony" is not often made explicit, in essence these terms reflect the biological concept of equilibrium (Pimm 1991). Predator-prey dy- namics have been well studied among nonhuman spe- cies for many years, and the equilibrium that such preda- tors maintain with their prey is often explained with reference to population dynamics (for a review, see Tay- lor 1984). A stable or fluctuating equilibrium is obtained when a predator population is limited in its ability to drive its prey population to extinction (Taylor 1984:18). Often, for example, predators reduce prey numbers, re- sulting in lower hunting returns, and this causes a de- cline in the predator population that allows the prey population to rebound. These types of processes can pro- duce oscillations in both predator and prey numbers, or a stable equilibrium can be maintained without either predator's or prey's being driven to extinction (Taylor 1984; for an application of these ideas to human hunters, see Winterhalder et al. 1988). Many human subsistence hunting populations also exist in equilibrium with their prey populations because they do not hunt their prey to extinction. Misguided logic has, however, led to the belief that such sustained harvesting is a goal of subsistence hunters rather than a consequence of density-dependent or independent popu- lation processes as it is in other species (Bunyard 1989, Feit 1987, Harris 1979, Nelson 1982, Reichel-Dolmatoff 1976). Some have argued that food taboos act to protect species particularly susceptible to local extinction (Mc- Donald 1977, Ross 1978). Others have argued that patch- choice decisions are made to avoid depleted areas (Feit 1973, Moore 1957). Still others have claimed that hunt- ers selectively avoid certain age and sex categories whose harvest has a greater negative impact on the prey population (Kay 1985, Jermy 1983; see Alvard 1993 Q for more citations). Simply observing that hunters return from the hunt with seemingly adequate amounts of game does not, however, justify the conclusion that native peoples are conservationists. Until recently there has been no opera- tional definition of conservation that would allow for adequate testing of its existence among native peoples. In addition, few data are offered to substantiate claims of conservationist practices by native peoples, and there are no data on prey populations and hunting harvests that would demonstrate whether extant hunters living in equilibrium do so because of "natural conservation" (Alvard 1993 Q, b). At the same time, empirical work has led researchers in the field of wildlife and conservation biology to question the previously assumed isomorphic relationship between the behaviors of native peoples and the goals of conserving biodiversity (Kay 1994, Redford and Stearman 1993, Redford 1991, Clad 1985; see, how- ever, Alcorn 1993). Reasoning from economic theory also casts doubt on the notion that individuals will con- serve open-access resources such as those usually ex- ploited by hunting peoples (Clark 1990, Hardin 1968). Finally, a number of human evolutionary ecologists 7 8 9