Data from: Disentangling the dynamics among climate, food availability, and reproduction in a pair-living, monogamous primate

We examined the hypothesis that pair-living, monogamous social systems evolved in environments with evenly distributed food resources, a homogenous distribution of females in space prevents males from monopolizing more than one female. Our study investigated the interplay between climatic variables (ambient temperature, rainfall), food availability (forest structure, phenology data), and infant production in a pair-living monogamous owl monkey population (322 births, 21 years, 22 groups) in the humid Chaco of Argentina. Associations between climatology and fruit availability ranged from -0.29 to 0.38, and some extreme events negatively impacted fruit availability. Variation in fruit availability was higher among years than territories, whereas infant production varied more among territories than it did across years. Our study makes specific contributions to examining the hypothetical “homogeneity” in the temporal and spatial distribution of food available to a pair-living monogamous primate and how such variation relates to infant production in the population.