Chimp & See Talk

guinea baboon greeting behaviours

  • asgoffe by asgoffe scientist

    Greetings involve approach-retreat interactions between two individuals which involve an element of social contact (vocalization and/or physical contact):

    touch (with hand),
    embrace,
    head-bob,
    mount,
    genital manipulation (sniff, grasp & pull, etc.),
    hip-clasp,
    tail-wrap (two tails wrap around each other, typically performed by males)
    and more!

    these elements may be combined, as in the case of #ACP0007b7y where a female performs a genital manipulation on an adult male and then they embrace.

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  • MimiA by MimiA scientist, moderator

    @Asgoffe diddling (which i took from this paper http://primate.uchicago.edu/2003ETHO.pdf) is that the same as genital manipulation? or at least the version when the male is being the one manipulated?

    we are looking for some hashtags to use for these behaviours so i woud suggested #diddling as we have been using, i saw you added #embrace (which is adorable by the way, super unscientific of me, i know) and then we could add #mounting maybe for what we saw that adult do to the infant.

    and then what do others think about #tailwrap when we eventually see that?

    i have another question, the mounting behavior seen between males, is that sex or is it more like dry humping? (i assume that when a female is mounted it is always sex but maybe that assumption isn't correct?)

    thank you!

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  • Snorticus by Snorticus

    Just want to throw in here that tagging and observing these baboons and their many complex behaviors is quite interesting - glad to have @asgoffe here to advise us.

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  • AnLand by AnLand moderator

    I just would like to add three things about baboons that might be good to know when comparing the baboon behavior with our chimpanzee experience. I thought it very interesting.

    1. In baboons, the philopatric sex is the females. The females stay in their natal community and the males disperse and join another community. (We learned in chimps it is the opposite. There the females disperse.)
    2. As a consequence*, baboons have matrilines (lines of descent from the maternal side -> my mother’s mother …) that set the ranking of the individuals. The eldest daughter gets a rank just below her mother. The same is true for her eldest daughter and for sisters. That means one matriline (“family”) has higher or lower ranking than the other one (A1, A2, A3, A4 >> B1, B2, B3 >> C1, C2 …). It's a linear dominance rank that is quite stable for females (but more in flux for males).
    3. In contrast to the chimp community, it is not the case that all adult males are higher ranking than all the females. There is of course the alpha male, but an older female from a “good” matriline can have a higher rank than a male. Especially if he only recently joined the community.

    About the greeting (diddling) behavior from a female -> male perspective, I’ve read that only higher-ranking females would do this. Which kind of makes sense to me.

    *I am not sure whether this is really a consequence of No. 1 or has other reasons, too.

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  • MimiA by MimiA scientist, moderator

    @asgoffe posted some interesting information here including that not all baboons have the same dispersal pattern and that Guinea baboons actually exhibit female biased dispersal http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/boards/BCP000000c/discussions/DCP0000hp6

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  • AnLand by AnLand moderator in response to MimiA's comment.

    Yes, I read her reply and just started to read the paper. That's interesting. I knew that hamadryas baboons are different in many respects, but never heard about it with guinea baboons.

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  • asgoffe by asgoffe scientist in response to MimiA's comment.

    @MimiA-Yes, I would say that #diddling is a form of #genitalmanipulation (when the male is the passive partner) but #genitalmanipulation can include sniffing or touching the genitalia of a male or female. it is just a broader category which i have used for my work. #touch is separate from #embrace (which is much more scientific than my original name for it which was "hug".)

    oh, and #mount is tricky. females may be mounted by males or other females and this behaviour can be observed regardless of oestrous phase (so females could be lactating, pregnant, or cycling and still be mounted by their male). males usually are not erect when mounting so that is what can be used to distinguish between #copulation and #mount. but you can also use the sexual swelling as to assist in cases when the video quality is a bit grainy. It is safe to say that true copulations do not occur when females are not tumescent/swollen. Here is a good paper for olive baboons: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X07002887.

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  • asgoffe by asgoffe scientist in response to AnLand's comment.

    @AnLand unfortunately there has not been much research published on Guinea baboons, but we are finding that they are very different from savannah baboons (which include olive, yellow and chacma baboons).

    In some ways Guineas are similar to hamadryas baboons, but their intersexual relationships are much looser (this paper is in review at the moment). Here is some literature to get you started on male-male relationships in Guinea baboons:

    http://www.pnas.org/content/111/41/14740.full

    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X15300453

    http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265-012-1425-1

    it is great that you are reading so much about savannah baboons. this knowledge will be really useful one we get into olive baboons territory.

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  • asgoffe by asgoffe scientist in response to asgoffe's comment.

    For those of you familiar with bonobos, I would imagine that greeting behaviour (e.g. #mounting & #gential_manipulation) in Guinea baboons (and likely other baboon species) may be somewhat similar to the G-G rubbing. perhaps linked to some aspect of the fission-fusion dynamics of their otherwise vastly different social systems. But that is just some WILD UNSCIENTIFIC SPECULATION!

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  • MimiA by MimiA scientist, moderator

    @asgoffe - THANK YOU!!! this is all super enlightening!!! 😄

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  • AnLand by AnLand moderator

    @vestigial found this very interesting baboon interaction video ACP0006z1d and ACP0006z1e that I would just like to post here

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