Sneaky Monkeys: An Audience Effect of Male Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta) on Sexual Behavior

Abstract

Males and females have different sexual interests and subsequently may show conflicting sexual strategies. While dominant males try to monopolize females, promiscuity benefits females and subordinate males. One way to escape monopolization by dominant males is to copulate in their absence. We tested this inhibitory effect of males on the sexual behavior of their group members in captive group-living Rhesus macaques. Copulations between females and nonalpha males almost exclusively took place when the alpha male was out of sight. Furthermore, the inhibiting effect was not unique for the alpha male. An upcoming nonalpha male also inhibited copulations of its group members, and three other nonalpha males inhibited female copulation solicitations. Females adjusted their behavior to the presence of bystander males, as they initiated and accepted initiations more often in absence than in presence of bystander males. Although not significant, in males, a similar pattern was found. The observed reduction in mating behavior in presence of bystander males is in accordance with an "audience effect," in which the behavior is modulated in relation to the presence or absence of third parties. This audience effect may serve as an important mechanism to reduce (aggressive) interruptions of subordinate male copulations.

MultiFacTV: module detection from higher-order time series biological data

“…This dataset recorded multiple time series genomic expression of yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae regarding to different environmental changes [28]. We considered six environmental stresses in this dataset, including heat shock, 0.32mM H 2 O 2 , 1mM menadione, 2.5mM DTT(dithiothreitol), 1.5mM diamide and 1M sorbitol.…”

“…H 2 O 2 -menadione modules. In [28], it has been shown that a large portion of genes in yeast co-regulate under H 2 O 2 stress and menadione stress despite that they are supposed to result in different reactive oxygen species. The MultiFacTV obtains similar findings and we present the genomic expression of two modules of such kind, see Figures 8(a) and 8(b).…”

“…Moreover, we find this module is annotated to functional terms like "protein catabolic process" and "cellular macromolecule catabolic process" ( p -values: 5.2 × 10 -7 and 2.5 × 10 -5 respectively). This can be interpreted by the fact that heat shock usually leads to protein unfolding [28]. The module 2 is annotated to functional terms like "ribonucleoprotein complex biogenesis" and "RNA binding" ( p -values: 8.6 × 10 -24 and 7.0 × 10 -7 ).…”

“…In some cases, the data may be in different sizes. For example, the original Yeast dataset [28] has different number of time-points for different environmental stresses. In the future, it would be interesting to extend the tensor factorization objective function of Tucker1 or Tucker2 [30] in a similar way to perform integrative module detection for such data.…”

Who's Watching Me: Female Siamese Fighting Fish Alter Their Interactions in Response to an Audience

“…Female rhesus monkeys attend to the presence of audience males and initiate and accept copulation solicitations more when an audience male is absent (Overduin‐Devries et al. ), while female bonobos are more sensitive to the presence of a female, reducing copulation calling frequency when an alpha female is in close proximity (Clay & Zuberbühler ). Human females eat more food when eating with friends than when alone or with strangers (De Castro ), and female capuchin monkeys were more efficient at a foraging task when another monkey was eating nearby (Dindo et al.…”