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Affiliation Among Females In Wild Hamadryas Baboons (Papio Hamadryas Hamadryas), Larissa Swedell

Publications and Research

Previous studies of hamadryas baboons have described a “star-shaped” sociogram, whereby the strongest social bonds within hamadryas one-male units are those between a leader male and his females and bonds among females are weak by comparison. This type of social organization has also been called “cross bonding” to distinguish it from the “female bonding” found in most papionin monkeys. Models of female primate socioecology have suggested that hamadryas baboons lack female bonding due to their reliance on scarce, widely-dispersed food resources. Here I report observational data from a wild population of hamadryas baboons in Ethiopia indicating that, while females varied …