Riveros, JC, Schaffner, CM and Aureli, F (2017) You are Not Welcome: Social Exchanges between Female Spider Monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi). International Journal of Primatology. pp. 1-16. ISSN 0164-0291

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Abstract

Group living leads to competition for food between group members. Two types of intragroup food competition may occur: scramble competition, in which all group members use the same resource, such that feeding opportunities are equal for everyone; and contest competition, in which some group members monopolize resources through aggression and dominance. In species in which females disperse from the natal group and immigrate into other groups, immigrant females increase group size and thus possibly food competition. Under these circumstances, other females may use aggression to discourage new females from joining the group. We assessed the distribution of aggression, embraces, and kisses among female spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) in relation to group tenure. We recorded social interactions during 1688 10-min focal animal samples on 11 females in Santa Rosa, Costa Rica. We found that aggression was rare between long-term resident females and aggression rates were not higher during feeding than in other contexts, suggesting there was little contest competition. Long-term residents and less recently immigrant females showed higher aggression rates toward the most recent immigrants than toward other females, especially during the first months after a female immigrated, which coincided with the dry season. We did not find similar patterns for embrace and kiss. These results suggest that other females target aggression toward the most recent immigrants to reduce scramble competition. This finding suggests that group tenure should be included in socioecological models for species with female dispersal. © 2017 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	0608 Zoology
Subjects:	Q Science > QH Natural history Q Science > QL Zoology
Divisions:	Natural Sciences & Psychology (closed 31 Aug 19)
Publisher:	Springer Verlag
Date Deposited:	21 Aug 2017 08:36
Last Modified:	04 Sep 2021 03:53
DOI or ID number:	10.1007/s10764-017-9982-9
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/6954

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