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

Recognizing skilful 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 members' behavioural responses before, during and after our manipulation to reveal whether they focused on the outcome of the male's 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 access to the specialist—increasing their grooming of him 10-fold and aggression near him fourfold. Both behaviours were predicted by the amount each female ate from the food box and returned to baseline within 2 weeks of its removal. This behavioural pattern supports an outcome-based assessment where females responded to male-provided benefits (utility) rather than attributing competence (value). By contrast, males from the wider party ate prodigiously from the reward but did not change their behaviour towards the specialist at all—revealing different social strategies corresponding to the social stratification of the Guinea baboon’s multi-level society.