Male consortship behaviour in chacma baboons: The role of demographic factors and female conceptive probabilities

By T. Weingrill, J. Lycett, L. Barrett, R. A. Hill, S. Henzi. 2003

91 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is evidence for a general relationship between male dominance rank and mating success in primates, although the strength of this relationship differs among species. In chacma baboons (Papio hamadryas ursinus) male rank is found to be of more importance than in the other savannah baboon subspecies. However, even though the priority-of-access model explains the proportion of time spent in consortship for males of different rank in chacmas, highest-ranking males usually consort less often than expected. In this study, conducted in the Drakensberg Mountains of Natal and at De Hoop in the Western Cape, we investigated why dominant males in four study troops consorted only between 50% and 75% of days that they were expected to consort according to the priority-of-access model. Consortship success of highest-ranking males was primarily dependant on the number of available oestrous females in a troop. This was likely due to costs involved in consorting which limit the amount of days that a male could spend in consortship. Females pass through several cycles before conceiving and highest-ranking males were observed to consort more often on the conceptive cycle compared to the nearest nonconceptive cycle, but this was only true for males that were already resident for several months. Recently immigrated males that became highest-ranking often consorted during nonconceptive female cycles, while older, lower-ranking males consorted during the conceptive cycles. We propose that males with longer residency have more information about reproductive state of females and thus higher reproductive success than recently immigrated males.

Subfields: Developmental Biology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e2d625c9540d603bf022efea632dca98fec12f62

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Citations in the corpus

Sexual selection in wild baboons: from mating opportunities to paternity success (2006, background): “…have indicated that high-ranking males may indeed discriminate conceptive from nonconceptive cycles; that is, that they are more likely to mate-guard females experiencing conceptive cycles than those experiencing nonconceptive cycles (Bulger 1993; Weingrill et al. 2003; Deschner et al. 2004).”
More than friends? Behavioural and genetic aspects of heterosexual associations in wild chacma baboons (2010, background): “…study (the necessary data were not available), a male’s contextual assessment of his paternity would have been facilitated by the long duration of mateguarding consortships in chacma baboons (lasting up to 13 days in our population, unpublished data, see also Bulger 1993; Weingrill et al. 2003).”
Potential causes and life-history consequences of sexual size dimorphism in mammals (2005, background): “SSD is also found in a number of social primate species where the occurrence of infanticide has been proposed to promote a promiscuous mating system in order to confuse paternity and prevent infanticide by males ( Weingrill et al ., 2003 ).”
Ecological, social, and reproductive factors shape producer–scrounger dynamics in baboons (2009, background): “Males not only mate guard (form sexual consortships with) females during their fertile period (Bercovitch 1991; Weingrill et al. 2003) but may also develop strong ‘‘friendships’’ with the lactating mothers of their infants in order to protect their offspring from infanticide (Palombit et al. 1997).”
Mate guarding and paternity in mandrills: factors influencing alpha male monopoly (2005, background): “As suggested for other species with sexual swellings (e.g. Weingrill et al. 2003), it seems that male mandrills may rely on additional cues to determine timing of female ovulation, including olfactory (anogenital secretions) and tactile (swelling turgidity) cues, as well as visual inspection of…”