Social status drives social relationships in groups of unrelated female rhesus macaques.

ABSTRACT: Strong social relationships confer health and fitness benefits in a number of species, motivating the need to understand the processes through which they arise. In female cercopithecine primates, both kinship and dominance rank are thought to influence rates of affiliative behaviour and social partner preference. Teasing apart the relative importance of these factors has been challenging, however, as female kin often occupy similar positions in the dominance hierarchy. Here, we isolated the specific effects of rank on social relationships in female rhesus macaques by analysing grooming patterns in 18 social groups that did not contain close relatives, and in which dominance ranks were experimentally randomized. We found that grooming was asymmetrically directed towards higher-ranking femal

SUBMITTER: Snyder-Mackler N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4707678 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature