Increased female competition for males with enhanced foraging skills in Guinea baboons
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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).
Teaser
Guinea baboon females monopolize males in relation to their current perceived utility.