The study, published in the journal Ambio, was led by Mahatub Khan Badhon of Virginia Tech and the University of Dhaka, together with an international team including Leandro Castello, M. Aaron MacNeil, Steven J. Cooke, and Vivian M. Nguyen. The team set out to test a deceptively simple question: are food and cultural values merely peripheral add-ons to recreational fishing, or are they part of the underlying architecture that organizes why different people fish? Their answer, grounded in one of the largest multidimensional surveys of urban shore anglers to date, is emphatically the latter.

Recreational fisheries are a massive phenomenon. An estimated 220 million people participate worldwide, and participation is growing among increasingly diverse populations. Yet the scientific frameworks used to understand anglers, including fishing motivations, catch orientation, and centrality to lifestyle, were largely built within leisure and sport traditions dating back to the 1970s. Motivations have typically been split into activity-general motives such as enjoying nature or relaxing, and activity-specific motives such as the thrill of the catch or pursuing trophy fish. Food-oriented motives have rarely been included, even though evidence stretching back to the 1990s showed that many anglers eat what they catch. Catch orientation measures attitudes toward catching something, catching many fish, catching large fish, and keeping fish, but harvesting fish is not the same as food provisioning as a social practice tied to household needs, sharing, identity, and tradition. Centrality to lifestyle, meanwhile, has usually been measured with leisure-based indicators adapted from activities like birdwatching.

To close this gap, the researchers surveyed shore anglers at 48 popular fishing sites in Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Rochester in the United States, and Windsor, St. Catharines, Hamilton, Toronto, and Kingston in Canada. Cities were purposively selected to capture a demographically heterogeneous urban angling population, and the number of survey sites per city was allocated using log-transformed population metrics to avoid over-sampling larger centers. Trained local assistants conducted intercept surveys using a stratified spatiotemporal design, with extra effort on weekends and holidays when fishing activity peaks. Online recruitment through QR-code follow-ups, tackle shops, Facebook groups, and an email listserv broadened coverage. After quality screening, 443 of 482 responses were retained for analysis.

The survey instrument was deliberately expanded. Twenty-one preference items measured on five-point Likert scales covered motivations, catch orientation, and centrality to lifestyle, but the team added new items probing food and cultural motives, and treated centrality as a multifaceted construct capable of reflecting economic, cultural, and social embeddedness. They also asked about catch usage, including eating fish, sharing fish with neighbors or fellow anglers, and saving money, alongside fish-eating frequency, reliance on locally caught fish, and awareness of consumption advisories. Sociodemographic questions covered age, gender, ethnicity, income, education, employment, and languages spoken at home. Nearly a third of respondents spoke at least one language other than English, with Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, French, Bengali, Cantonese, and Portuguese among the most common.

The analytical workflow was stepwise and statistically rigorous. Hierarchical cluster analysis of the preference and behavior items revealed five coherent latent dimensions: food provisioning, cultural or traditional values, challenge and performance, leisure, and social-financial centrality. Strikingly, items measuring food-oriented motivation, keeping fish, eating fish, and sharing fish clustered tightly together, forming a food provisioning dimension with high internal consistency, as did the social-financial items. Cultural items such as fishing as tradition and identity grouped together with moderate coherence. This cross-framework convergence is one of the study’s most important technical findings: food-linked items from four different measurement traditions loaded jointly on the same underlying structure, suggesting that food provisioning is not a niche topic but a genuine latent construct of recreational fisheries.

Next, k-means clustering with six validation criteria identified three distinct angler groups, and canonical discriminant analysis defined their separation along two axes. The first canonical function explained 84.3 percent of the among-group variation and formed the primary dividing line between leisure and sport fishing on one side and food or subsistence practices on the other. The leisure and sport oriented group emphasized outdoor enjoyment, challenge, companionship, and catching large or numerous fish, while positioning away from harvest-dependent dimensions. The cultural and community oriented group reported that stopping fishing would reduce income, cut access to food or protein, erode traditions, and sever social connections, indicating that fishing is closely tied to household well-being and continuity of tradition. The provisioning and food oriented group sat between the two, associated with direct food use, sharing, food-oriented motivation, and fishing-related memories, but with less perceived economic dependence than the cultural group.

Perhaps the most provocative result concerns who these anglers are. Multivariate tests showed that sociodemographic characteristics explained only 2.2 percent of the variation in group membership, meaning the three groups could not be cleanly distinguished by age, ethnicity, income, or education. Food provisioning and culturally meaningful fishing, in other words, are not confined to specific minority or low-income communities, as earlier case studies sometimes implied. They appear to be mainstream, widely distributed dimensions of urban shore fishing in the lower Great Lakes. The groups did differ strongly in attitudes and behaviors: centrality to lifestyle and catch usage each explained more than half of the multivariate variation among groups, far more than motivations or catch orientation, suggesting that what fishing functionally provides in people’s lives matters more than what they expect from a day on the water.

The implications for management are substantial. If agencies assume that licensed anglers want only sport and recreation, they risk designing regulations, creel surveys, and engagement strategies that miss the needs of a large share of their constituency. Harvest limits, consumption advisories, and access rules carry very different consequences for an angler who releases everything than for one who shares catch with extended family or relies on fish to stretch a household budget. The authors argue that recognizing a fuzzy boundary between recreational and subsistence fishing, and treating food and cultural values as core rather than peripheral, would produce more representative monitoring and more inclusive policy.

The study has limits the authors acknowledge: it focused on urban, shore-based access, relied on cross-sectional self-reports subject to recall and social-desirability bias, and used descriptive rather than predictive classification methods. The centrality scale will need confirmatory factor analysis to establish measurement invariance across groups. Still, the multidimensional perspective and analytical approach appear broadly transferable to other regions and governance contexts. What emerges is a fundamentally richer portrait of angling: not a single activity with a single meaning, but a continuum running from pure sport to household provisioning, with culture and community woven throughout. For the millions of people casting lines from city shores, the fish on the dinner table, and the traditions it carries, may matter just as much as the fight to land it.

Subject of Research: Food provisioning and cultural dimensions of urban recreational fisheries in the lower Great Lakes

Article Title: The overlooked role of food and cultural dimensions in recreational fisheries

Article References: Badhon, M. K., Castello, L., MacNeil, M. A., Stern, M. J., Fiorella, K. J., Beaudoin, C., Coffin-Schmitt, J. L., Rice, E. D., Crowley-Aksamit, C. K., Andersen, A. M., Graham, R. M., Stedman, R., Cooke, S. J., Nyboer, E. A., & Nguyen, V. M. (2026). The overlooked role of food and cultural dimensions in recreational fisheries. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02484-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02484-x

Keywords: recreational fisheries, food provisioning, angler diversity, Great Lakes, cultural practices, urban fishing, fishing motivations, catch orientation, centrality to lifestyle, subsistence fishing, fisheries management, cluster analysis

The research, led by Kim Dianne Ligue-Sabio and colleagues at the University of the Philippines Mindanao, is notable not just for what it found but for how it found it. Over three fieldwork sessions conducted between May 2021 and May 2022, the team logged 270.5 hours of direct observation across 29 days, recording the behavior of visible troop members in 1,082 scan samples. Each scan lasted five minutes and was followed by a ten-minute pause, creating a fifteen-minute sampling cycle that ran from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM. At every scan, the observers noted the primary behavior of each visible animal and recorded the GPS coordinates of the troop’s approximate center, generating a rich spatiotemporal dataset that could be interrogated with formal spatial statistics.

The five most frequently observed behaviors were moving, recorded in 99.26 percent of scans, resting at 92.42 percent, grooming at 68.48 percent, feeding at 67.74 percent, and foraging at 57.12 percent. To analyze these, the researchers turned to the Getis-Ord Gi* statistic, a hotspot detection method that identifies statistically significant clusters of activity, and to a more sophisticated technique called Emerging Hotspot Analysis. The latter builds a space-time cube, aggregating the fifteen-minute scans into hourly bins across a fishnet grid, then applies both the Getis-Ord statistic and the Mann-Kendall trend test to classify each bin as a new, consecutive, intensifying, persistent, diminishing, sporadic, oscillating, or historical hotspot or coldspot. The result is a map that shows not just where behaviors cluster, but how those clusters rise and fall through the day.

The temporal findings were strikingly clean. Foraging peaked between 8:00 and 9:00 in the morning and then declined steadily, a trend confirmed by the Mann-Kendall statistic. Grooming showed the opposite trajectory, climbing through the afternoon to peak between 4:00 and 5:00 PM. Feeding, resting, and moving showed no significant monotonic trends across the day. Read together, the data describe a troop that prioritizes energy acquisition early, exploiting both provisioned food and wild resources, and then shifts its attention to social bonding and rest as the day winds down. It is a familiar structure of primate time budgets, but here it plays out across a landscape divided between houses and forest.

The spatial analysis added a second layer of insight. Feeding, grooming, and resting clustered tightly, with significant spatial autocorrelation emerging at distance bands as short as two meters and never exceeding seventeen meters. This tight clustering suggests repeated use of specific, localized spots for social and resting activities, likely anchored to the fixed provisioning site and a consistent sleeping area within the village. Foraging, by contrast, only clustered at a thirty-meter bandwidth, and its hotspots extended deep into the forest-agricultural mosaic, well beyond the built-up zone. The researchers interpret this broader dispersion as a strategy for locating diverse food resources and reducing within-group competition by avoiding the repeated exploitation of the same patches.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns diet. Despite being fed regularly by the Moncadista community, a local religious sect that regards the macaques as spiritually connected to their ancestors and strictly prohibits hunting them, the animals continued to forage intensively for natural foods. Observers recorded them eating Chinese bamboo leaves, fruits, grass, and insects in the forest, alongside provisioned bananas, eggs, peanuts, and even junk food in the village. The persistence of foraging hotspots in the forest suggests that human provisioning alone does not meet the troop’s nutritional needs, particularly for a group of at least fifty individuals. Primates actively forage to maintain an optimal nutritional balance, and insects in particular provide protein that cultivated crops may lack. The implication for conservation is direct: even provisioned macaque populations depend on intact forest habitat.

The study also offers a window into why the macaques prefer the village for their downtime. Although there is no hunting pressure anywhere in the troop’s range, grooming and resting hotspots were concentrated in built-up areas while coldspots for these behaviors appeared throughout the forest. The researchers observed a telling incident in the forest: the appearance of a large red-tailed green rat snake triggered synchronized alarm calls and mobbing behavior by more than twenty macaques, a response never seen in the village. Farm deterrents such as dogs and slingshots are present in agricultural areas, while the macaques appear habituated to the domestic dogs within the settlement. This pattern fits the predator avoidance and human-shield hypotheses, in which prey animals use proximity to humans as a buffer against predators, combined with the proximity-to-food-resource hypothesis that favors resting sites near reliable food.

Methodologically, the paper makes a case for pairing static and dynamic spatial tools. The conventional hotspot analysis pinpointed key areas of activity that could serve as targets for management interventions, such as preserving foraging zones or timing tourism activities. The emerging hotspot analysis then revealed how those areas function differently across the day: feeding and foraging in the village produced oscillating hotspots, meaning the animals engaged in those behaviors elsewhere earlier, while grooming and resting produced consecutive hotspots that only intensified toward the end of the day. The two approaches validated each other where patterns agreed and exposed new structure where they diverged, though the researchers caution that aggregating scans into hourly bins may have smoothed away finer behavioral fluctuations.

The setting itself is unusual and worth savoring. New Israel sits within Mount Apo Natural Park, a protected area whose original tropical lowland dipterocarp forest has been transformed into a patchwork of residences, secondary forest, and small farms growing taro, cassava, sweet potato, and fruit trees. The community has built a small tourism industry around the macaques, complete with parks and ziplines. During the first fieldwork session, conducted amid COVID-19 pandemic restrictions when tourist visits were limited, the troop’s ranging area in the forest was markedly larger, at roughly 184,000 square meters, than in the later sessions, which shrank to under 95,000 square meters. The authors suggest that reduced tourist provisioning may have pushed the macaques to forage more widely, though visitor data were not systematically collected.

For a species whose fortunes have turned grim, the study carries real weight. In 2024, the International Union for Conservation of Nature reclassified the long-tailed macaque as Endangered, citing a 50 to 70 percent decline in global populations over three decades driven by hunting, biomedical exploitation, the pet trade, and habitat loss. Understanding how the species navigates human-modified landscapes is therefore no longer academic. The New Israel macaques demonstrate remarkable behavioral plasticity, running a daily circuit that treats village and forest as complementary resources rather than alternatives. The authors argue that conservation planning must account for both, protecting forest foraging grounds while managing the built-up areas where interactions occur. Future work, they note, should quantify provisioning rates, predator presence, and food distribution to build fuller models of what draws these adaptable primates back and forth across the boundary between two worlds.

Subject of Research: Spatiotemporal behavioral patterns of long-tailed macaques in a human-modified Philippine landscape

Article Title: Spatiotemporal patterns of behavior by long-tailed macaques Macaca fascicularis (Raffles 1821) in a human-modified environment

Article References: Ligue-Sabio, K. D., Plaza, A. R., Sabanal, B., Oguis, G. F., Torrefiel, J., & Gamalo, L. E. (2026). Spatiotemporal patterns of behavior by long-tailed macaques Macaca fascicularis (Raffles 1821) in a human-modified environment. Discover Conservation, 3(1), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44353-025-00071-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44353-025-00071-x

Keywords: long-tailed macaques, Macaca fascicularis, hotspot analysis, emerging hotspot analysis, human-wildlife coexistence, behavioral ecology, foraging behavior, food provisioning, Mount Apo, conservation planning, primates, Philippines