Clade 4: Cat Fight!

This will be my last entry to The Phylogeny of Max while in the employ of the Baboon Research Unit of the University of Cape Town. Barring a mass migration (they’ve evaded before) of our beloved monkeys, we will finish our data collection on the evening of the 31st. Then I will no longer be a researcher here in South Africa. I will magically turn into a tourist! This is fine. Bittersweet, as they say. Few can say they’ve spent such an intimate and extended time with baboons, and of this I am thankful and proud.

That’s said, time for a beer or 5. The last week of work has been tumultuous, to say the least. Not between us humans; that part has been easy and fun. It’s the monkeys. They haven’t been getting along.

Possible reasons why:

It’s getting cold and they’re poorly rested and grumpy. Possible, not likely.

There is a new born infant (scrawny and funny looking, like my sister was when she was born). Maybe they have been kicking hell out of each other because they have baby envy, or the birth is upsetting the dominance balance. Ehhhh, maaaaybe.

Is there a new male around? Might be, but I haven’t seen one, and the other males are no more (or less) combative than usual.

They are sick of looking at our disgusting hairless (mostly) faces and changeable multicolored bodies? Wouldn’t blame them, but that doesn’t seem right.

All of those things seem stressful but not SOOO stressful that they would…wait a second! STRESS! That sounds right. It isn’t one thing, it’s many! The straw that broke the camel’s back kind of a thing. So these animals are stressed out. No shit, they have to find food and water every day, and they might get killed at any turn by a lion. In the case of my baboons, there are no more lions around, so replace lion with Toyota Avalon. The males always fight anyway, so we’re not really talking about them, although they definitely get involved with the females fisticuffs. The ladies are stressed out, and they kick ass when they’re stressed out. Watch your back.

There are plenty of reasons to be stressed out, so baboons, like good social animals, deal with stress as a group, or more accurately as many small groups. They groom each other. And they have favorites. It’s like the hair salon my grandmother used to go to. These old ladies would come in and spend the day gossiping and chatting and getting their hair done. There were (most likely) less mites and ticks hidden in Nanny’s blue locks than there are in the course manes of female baboons, but the stress relief is just as real. The baboons (and the grannies) leave feeling refreshed and relaxed.

But it isn’t as relaxing to go to a different hair salon each week, and gossip with different ladies. Too complicated. Too many personalities to appease and rules to remember. The ladies who have the most rewarding Saturday salon experience are the ones who regularly patronize the same spot, with the same group.

This is true of baboons, as well. The baboons with the lowest glucocorticoid (a compound found in mammals, and in elevated levels in stressed out mammals) levels in their poo are the ones who have small grooming groups. The baboons who groom with many more baboons still get a benefit from the behavior, just not as big of a benefit. Fewer, closer friends relieve more stress than many, peripheral friends.

So what is causing their stress? Like we said in the beginning during my brilliantly faked inquisition into the cause of all these fights (I knew where this was going all along), there are quite a few stressors. In a normal population of baboons, existing in a healthy ecosystem with all of its parts, 95% of adult baboons die by getting eaten by some other animal, mostly lions. I’d say that’s pretty damn stressful. If 19 out of 20 in your graduating class were going to be eaten by a lion, you’d be stressed out too. There are also the males in the troop.

Males are bigger, because they have to have something to offer to ensure they get picked to breed. What they have evolved to offer is protection. Unfortunately, the protection is most often from other males who want to kill the babies that don’t belong to them. But it’s protection, none the less. Females have to not only bare and rear the young, they also have to appease and bond with the males so they are protected. They do this by grooming and copulating. If a female copulates with many of the males in her troop, they will all protect her and her offspring because the baby MIGHT be theirs. Obviously only one of them is the proud papa, but they don’t know which, and neither does she.

When a new male shows up, an immigrant male, the females get stressed out. They have to get on this males good side right away, or they might become childless mothers very quickly, and that sucks. So they groom a lot. As long as they’re regular grooming crew is available.

What happens, though, when a grooming partner meets an untimely demise? How do baboons mourn? You guessed it! They get stressed out. If Doris and Esther are best pals, and are each other’s favorite grooming partner, what does Doris do if Esther takes a trip to the big sleeping site in the sky? Well, she has to replace Esther as best she can. This means she broadens her grooming circle. This is not only stressful to Doris. It is also a pain in the ass for all the other female baboons, because their grooming circles have to be broadened by proxy. So all the ladies are a bit on edge while they wait to see how everything will work out.

When Nanny’s favorite salon closed, I don’t think she got in more fistfights than usual, but I can’t say for sure. She fought a lot.

So that’s what’s going down in baboon town this week. I’m on my way out, the gals are fighting they’re way towards a less stressful existence, and the sands pour through the hourglass. Such are the days of our lives…