A new study has revealed that baboons groom each other early in the morning so that they would be favored through the rest of the day.
A new study from Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen and Zoological Society of London shows grooming between individuals in a group of baboons was not practiced without ulterior motives.
To be groomed has hygienic benefits and was stress relieving for the individual, while grooming another individual could provide access to infants, mating opportunities and high quality food by means of tolerance at a patch.
Claudia Sick, MSc biologist, said that they investigated whether diurnal changes in the value of one commodity, tolerance at shared food patches, lead to diurnal patterns of affiliative interaction, namely grooming.
This study found that social strategies of baboons could vary across the day and the findings suggested that group-living animals optimize certain elements of their social strategies over short periods of time and it was also indicated that social strategies might be even more flexible and optimized over even shorter periods that previously appreciated.
These new insights highlighted the importance of understanding the full range of time periods over which social strategies might be optimized and such knowledge would be crucial when studying the social behavior and strategies of group-living animals.
