Wins and losses in intergroup conflicts reflect energy balance in red-tailed monkeys.

ABSTRACT: The energetic costs and benefits of intergroup conflicts over feeding sites are widely hypothesized to be significant, but rarely quantified. In this study, we use short-term measures of energy gain and expenditure to test whether winning an intergroup encounter is associated with greater benefits, and losing with greater costs. We also test an alternative perspective, where groups fight for access to large food sources that are neither depletable nor consistently monopolizable: in this case, a group that has already fed on the resource and is willing to leave first (the loser) is supplanted by a newly arrived group (the winner). We evaluate energy balance and travel distance during and after encounters for six groups of red-tailed monkeys in Kibale National Park, Uganda. We find that winn

SUBMITTER: Brown M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8977655 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature