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Article History

Received: 1 November 2024

Accepted: 6 January 2026

First Online: 28 February 2026

Competing interests

: The author declares no competing interests.

: Research was conducted with authorization from the Matsigenka Native Community of Tayakome and the Servicio Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas por el Estado del Perú (SERNANP). This study also conforms to the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki and follows standards for the protection of research subjects implemented by the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, with approval from the Institutional Review Board of Vanderbilt University (No. 110531, 2010–2014), the Ethics Council of the Max Planck Society (No. 2019_27, 2019–2023), and the Institutional Research Ethics Committee of Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Peru (No. 22001, 2022–2025).

: Verbal informed consent from participants was requested in Matsigenka and obtained after the nature and possible consequences of the study were explained during community-wide meetings at the beginning of each field trip conducted during the period 2010–2023. Individual informed consent was requested again when visiting a participant’s house for the first time during each field season, to ensure individual, voluntary informed consent. The author is fluent in Matsigenka, but in order to ensure rigorous understanding of the research and the requested consent, this request was conducted with the aid of native Matsigenka translators. Oral consent was requested because several people in the study community are illiterate, and it would not be ethical to ask them to mark a written consent form. We emphasized to participants that all information collected for this research is confidential and will be anonymized to protect their identity. Additionally, individual interviews were conducted in a private setting to ensure confidentiality and anonymity. Results were presented to, and discussed with, Matsigenka participants in community-wide meetings prior to manuscript submission, and their approval for publication was requested again after these discussions. Informed consent was requested to use people’s confidential responses and anonymized data solely for the purposes of this research. Therefore, if other researchers would like to use these data for other purposes, informed consent must be requested again from the participants.