Experimental condition
We selected three groups of bonnet macaques from a set of 24 groups located around the city of Mysore, India (Erinjery et al., 2015) based on their exposure to anthropogenic packaged food (Bull temple group-High, Foot hill group-Moderate, T. Betahalli group-Low). Based on home range, habitats of the 3 groups could be also classified along the urban dimension based on built up area in the following manner: Bull temple group-Urban (>50% built-up area), Foot hill group-Semi urban (10-50% built up area) and T. Betahalli group-Rural/Natural (>10% built up area). All the groups have been under intermittent monitoring for over 25 years and hence their feeding ecology and access to sources of artificial enclosed food was adequately known (see Dhananjaya et al. (2021) for details on study groups). We offered an extractable food item, peanut (native form with intact shell) on terrestrial substratum to isolated and passive macaques and recorded their use of hand/mouth to acquire peanut and to process peanut (see Dhananjaya et al. (2021) for detailed experimental design). The experiment was conducted in three phases involving a single group in each phase and behavioral responses were recorded using camcorders (Sony DCR-SX21, Sony DCR-DVD 650 and Sony HDR-CX405).