Evolution of primate peace
Auteurs:White, Frances J.; Waller, Michel T.; Boose, Klaree J.
Année de publication:2015
Date de publication:
In environments where resources are limited, as is often the case for wild nonhuman primates, success in competition with conspecifics is of major evolutionary significance. Behaviors that increase competitive abilities to gain limited resources will be selected for if their benefits, in terms of differential survival and lifetime reproductive success, outweigh their costs. Nonhuman primates competing for reproductive success are typically limited by access to resources. More specifically, male reproductive success is limited by access to females while females, with the high cost associated with gestation and lactation, are more typically limited by access to food. Wrangham’s(1980) ecological model of female bonding and competition proposes that the distribution of food affects female social structures as there is a strong link between the defendability of food, the costs of female bonding,and the corresponding dispersal of females. In species that eat food that is defendable such as fruit, groups of related females were predicted to cooperatively defend food sources from outside females within a hierarchical frame. In species that depend on nondefendable foods such as leaves, competition should be reduced and females would not experience the same level of bonding and cooperation. Subsequently, their relationships would be loosely defined. Since then, primatologists have incorporated patch size (Janson, 1988), intra and intergroup contest and scramble competition (Isbell, 1991), and dispersal, tolerance, hierarchies, and kind dimensions (Sterck, Watts & van Schaik, 1997) that have further refined models of primate sociality based on varying degrees of female competition for food....