The habitats of baboons and their social interactions combine to influence the individual movements in a troop and ultimately determine the overall group structure, a study has found.
The findings showed that the most important predictor of baboons' decisions about where to move is where other troop members have gone in the recent past -- specifically, within the last five minutes.
The more baboons have walked through a certain spot in this time, the more attractive it is to individuals, researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Germany said.
In addition, environmental factors, such as roads and the vegetation density of their habitat, also play a key role in how baboons move together as a group.
"We also found that baboons tend to use man-made roads and, to a lesser degree, animal paths, allowing them to effectively 'commute' to and from their group's sleeping site," said lead author Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin from the Max Planck Institute.
For the study, the team tracked 25 wild olive baboons belonging to a single troop with second-by-second global positioning system (GPS) tracking at the Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia, Kenya.
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"The animals' movements are also constrained by habitat features such as vegetation density in the area. In particularly dense environments, for example, the troop moves slower and individuals become less aligned in their direction of travel, showing how local environmental complexity can impact the overall structure and motion of groups," Strandburg-Peshkin added, in the paper published in eLife.
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