Increased female competition for males with enhanced foraging skills in Guinea baboons

Recognizing skillful group members is crucial for making optimal social choices. Whether and how nonhuman animals attribute skill to others is still debated. Using a lever-operated food box, we enhanced the foraging skill of a single male ( the specialist ) in one zoo housed and two wild groups of Guinea baboon ( Papio papio ). We measured group member’s behav-ioral responses before, during, and after our manipulation to reveal whether they focused on the outcome of the males’ actions or changed their assessment of his long-term value. During the manipulation, females in the specialist’s unit, but not the wider group, competed over ac-cess to the specialist - increasing their grooming of him tenfold and aggression near him four-fold. Both behaviors were predicted by the amount each female ate from the food box and re-turned to baseline within two weeks of its removal. This behavioral pattern supports an out-come-based assessment where females responded to male-provided benefits (utility) rather than attributing competence (value).