Male Parenting

• by mkavooss

  How common is it for male chimpanzees to take on the parenting role?

  Posted March 13, 2017 9:27 PM

• by MimiA scientist, moderator

  Hi @mkavooss

  The best paper on the topic is from Tai: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0008901

  "Here we report 18 cases of adoption, a highly costly behavior, of orphaned youngsters by group members in Taï forest chimpanzees. Half of the adoptions were done by males and remarkably only one of these proved to be the father."

  Adoption is not as common at other sites as far as i know and male adoption is quite rare but i know at at least 1 other site where it has been observed 😃 Remember of course that there are only a handful of sites with habituated apes in general though 😃

  Posted March 14, 2017 4:28 PM

• by MimiA scientist, moderator

  Hi again, I just realized you didn't mean in adoptions only which makes your question harder to answer 😉

  The males generally do not carry the infants if their mom is around, but they do play with their kids and will share food with them. But if mom is around then dad's influence is certainly limited 😃 There is also quite some debate regarding whether the father's know they are the fathers since female chimps do perform"sneaky copulations" and will mate with males that are not the alpha.

  some reading :

  • Male Competition and Paternity in Wild Chimpanzees of the Taı¨ Forest: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/Dominance/Papers/boesch_et_al.pdf
  • Chimpanzee fathers bias their behaviour towards their offspring: http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/11/160441
  • Kin biased investment in wild chimpanzees: http://www.eva.mpg.de/documents/Brill/Lehmann_Kin_Behaviour_2006_1554988.pdf
  • Male-Mediated Gene Flow in Patrilocal Primates: http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:1552428:6/component/escidoc:2082130/Schubert_Male-mediated_PlosOne_2011_1552428.pdf
  • Male–female socio-spatial relationships and reproduction in wild chimpanzees: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265-013-1509-6

  Posted March 15, 2017 11:02 PM