Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Reyna-Hurtado, Rafael
• Chapman, Colin A
• Melletti, Mario

Titel

Females Move in Tight Crowds, Males Roam: Socioecology and Movement Ecology of Mandrills

Ist Teil von

• Movement Ecology of Afrotropical Forest Mammals, 2023, p.171-185

Ort / Verlag

Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx) have a unique social system for primates, with huge groups of hundreds of individuals and males moving in and out of the group seasonally. Despite intensive field studies conducted at several sites in the Congo Basin rainforests, the mechanisms and adaptation of their social organization are still poorly understood. How do groups maintain their huge size while moving around in the forest with poor visibility? How do solitary males find groups in the vast forests? And what are the adaptive advantages of these behaviors? In this review, I summarize what we know surrounding these questions and compare mandrill ecology with that of Neotropical social mammals, offering potential explanations for these questions. Group crowdedness and frequent exchange of long-distance calls could be keys to the collective movement of large groups that engage in regular subgrouping. The adaptive benefits of the large group size possibly lie in female tactics relating to infanticide avoidance and polyandrous mating. While very little is known about how solitary males find groups at the onset of the mating season, the adaptive function of their seasonal influxes can be relatively well explained as foraging and mating tactics. Since the major questions of mandrill social organization are strongly related to their movement ecology, intensive movement research using GPS telemetries and remote sensing is crucially needed to disentangle the social system of this intriguing monkey. Further, broader comparisons among the social movement of rainforest mammals will be essential to comprehensively understand their movement ecology.