Social Behaviour and ‘Agonistic Buffering’ in the Wild Barbary Macaque Macaca sylvana L.

Abstract

In the Middle Atlas of Morocco Macaca sylvana live in multimale groups of 12 to 30 individuals. With extensive home range overlap intergroup encounters are frequent, usually peaceful and variable in nature. The social interactions of babies are described and particular attention is paid to male care of babies and male-male encounters in which one male appears to use a baby to regulate his behaviour with another. This type of interaction is called ‘agonistic buffering’. The terminology used to describe male-baby (or infant) interactions and the possible significance of agonistic buffering, in this and other non-human primates, are discussed.

Triadic awareness predicts partner choice in male–infant–male interactions in Barbary macaques

“…Ogawa 1995b for Tibetan macaques), but that the holder chooses specific male (receiver) based on the infant he has access to. This adjustment is based on the patterns of infant handling in Barbary macaques, in which bridging interactions are typically preceded by or alternating with long dyadic handling periods between infant and one of the males later involved in the bridging interaction (see Deag and Crook 1971). The low availability of infants leads to long handling episodes making it rather unlikely that males would be able to find a particular infant (or be motivated to "give up" one infant for another) based on their choice of a receiver male.…”

“…Perry et al 2004). In order to reduce this problem, we controlled the holder's relationships with the infant and absolute and relative dominance rank of the receiver which may affect the holder's choice of the receiver according to previous studies (Deag and Crook 1971;Paul et al 1996). We also suggest, that the study of triadic awareness of infant-male relationships might be less vulnerable to the described problem of ambiguity compared to the studies based on dominance relationships, where being part of the same hierarchy an individual may base its knowledge of others' dominance relationships either on monitoring of their interactions (triadic awareness) or on their own dominance relationships with each of other individuals, e.g.…”

“…Infant handling is found across different taxa (see Riedman 1982 for a review; Clutton-Brock 2006) with pronounced interspecific variation in intensity and type of interactions (Whitten 1987;Woodroffe and Vincent 1994;Hrdy 2007). In several species of Old World monkeys, males engage in a specific type of polyadic infant handling so called bridging interactions (Ogawa 1995a), triadic male-infant interactions (Taub 1980), male-infant-male interactions (Zhao 1996), or agonistic buffering (Deag and Crook 1971). During these interactions typically two males simultaneously manipulate one infant exhibiting a typical series of ritualized behaviour including teeth chattering, lifting the infant above their heads and inspection of the infant's genitals (see Deag 1980).…”

“…During these interactions typically two males simultaneously manipulate one infant exhibiting a typical series of ritualized behaviour including teeth chattering, lifting the infant above their heads and inspection of the infant's genitals (see Deag 1980). Bridging has been reported in several papionin primates: Barbary Macaca sylvanus (Deag and Crook 1971), Tibetan M. thibetana (Ogawa 1995a), stumptail M. acrtoides (Estrada and Sandoval 1977), longtail M. fascicularis (de Waal et al 1976), Assamese M. assamensis (Bernstein and Cooper 1998) and bonnet macaques M. radiata (Silk and Samuels 1984) as well as yellow Papio cynocephalus (Collins 1986), olive P. anubis (Smuts 1985) and chacma baboons P. ursinus (Busse and Hamilton 1981), sooty mangabeys Cercocebus atys (Busse and Gordon 1984), gray-cheeked mangabeys Cercocebus albigena (Chalmers 1968) and geladas Theropithecus gelada (Dunbar 1984).…”

“…Most interactions are initiated and maintained by males, but the contact seems voluntary and infants can be responsible for its start or termination (BK personal observation). Male infant handling bouts can take up to 20 minutes (Deag and Crook 1971) and up to over an hour (BK personal observation) and are often alternated with bridging interactions.…”