Species with slow life history strategies that invest in few offspring with extended parental care need to adapt their behaviour to cope with anthropogenic changes that occur within their lifetime. Here we show that a female chacma baboon (Papio ursinus) who commonly ranges within urban space in the City of Cape Town, South Africa, stops using urban space after giving birth. This change of space use occurs without any significant change in daily distance travelled or social interactions that would be expected with general risk-sensitive behaviour after birth. Instead, we suggest this change occurs because of the specific and greater risks the baboons experience within the urban space compared to natural space, and because leaving the troop (to enter urban space) may increase infanticide risk. This case study can inform methods used to manage the baboon’s urban space use in Cape Town and provides insight into how life history events alter individuals’ use of anthropogenic environments.

This dataset was calculated from high-resolution GPS data, recording at 1Hz from individual tracking collars deployed on n = 16 adult baboons. GPS data was cleaned as processed as per procedures outlined in the manuscript.

Dataframes are supplied in csv format.