Evolution.

Society for Experimental Biology

Date:: 1953

Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Evolution. Source: Wellcome Collection.

449/484 (page 417)

SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR AND PRIMATE EVOLUTION 419 and troups, as in the baboon. In some genera of Macaca, Cercocebus and CercopithecuSy males living alone have been observed. Fighting is often a consequence of competition for females between animals of many species, and Beach (private communication) has also shown that aggressive behaviour is closely associated and is a part of mating behaviour in many mammals, including the primates. It is natural, therefore, to inquire to what extent the primate mating relations engender fights between the males, and then it becomes clear that dominance also plays an important role in controlling intragroup fights between males. Zuckerman noted that in the captive colonies of Hymadryas baboons fighting occurred between the males from time to time. But since mating provocation continually exists in such a colony, we must inquire further why this type of fighting was not continuous. From time to time the colony at the London Zoo was disrupted by fights which began between some of the bachelor males over the possession of females. Zuckerman noted that this usually occurred when the overlord failed to exert his dominance over the subordinate males, and thus had failed to maintain the possession of all his females. When this occurred, it sometimes came about that having failed on one occasion, he was successfully ousted from the dominant position by one of the subordinate males. In these circumstances, the stability of the group was maintained, and various members took up their positions under the new overlord. If, however, one of the bachelors was not successful in this attempt, fighting broke out throughout the whole colony, and continued for as long as a week or two. During this time periodic fights would occur for possession of the females, and this would often lead either to an encounter between two males, or to the physical dismemberment of the female over which it had developed. In these fights it also sometimes happened that the young were maltreated or killed. These fights do not appear to be restricted to baboons in captivity, since Zuckerman found that many adult males of a wild baboon troup shot in Africa bore severe skin lesions. Since it is known that in those regions in which the specimens were shot man had almost eliminated the larger carnivores which are their natural predators, and also that they do not fight with other species of animals, it is inferred from the high incidence of these lesions that intragroup fights occur in the wild state, and thus that the captive colonies were in this important respect representative of the wild populations. The behaviour of macaque males is essentially similar, as it is possible to identify a male dominance hierarchy which is maintained without fights between the males, despite the provocative and aggressive behaviour of the 27-2