This paper tests the idea that subsistence hunters use selective intraspecific prey choice to increase the sustainability of their long-term harvest-in other words, to conserve. It is suggested that much of what has been considered conservation by native peoples is probably epiphenomenal. The misidentification of apparent conservation as genuine is a result of the focus on sustained harvests rather than on behaviors that not only aim at increasing the sustainability of the harvest in the long term but also are costly in the short term. Optimal foraging models are here used to generate alternative predictions to those of conservation. Data on the intraspecific prey choice of the Piro, subsistence hunters of the Peruvian Neotropics, indicate that they do not selectively choose sex and age types that minimize the impact on prey populations. Rather, their decisions are more closely predicted by optimal foraging theory. Evolutionary models do not, however, rule out conservation as a strategy for resource acquisition, and productive research may well follow from an extension of the logic and the rigorous methodology of evolutionary ecology to the identification of true conservation and the contexts in which it is an adaptive strategy.
