6: Primate Ecology and Behavior

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Learning Objectives

Describe the behavioral variation that exists within the Primate Order and how primate behavior and morphology are influenced by diet, predation, and other ecological factors.
Explain why primates live in groups.
Distinguish primate social systems from mating systems.
Contrast male and female reproductive and parental investment strategies.
Describe the ways in which primates communicate.
Evaluate the evidence for primate cultural variation.

Image: "Whatcha got there?" by Matthew Hoelscher originally posted to Flickr under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

6.1: Ecology
If you’ve ever seen a female monkey cooing over her newborn baby or watched a tufted capuchin monkey use rocks as a hammer and anvil to crack open a nut, then you know how interesting nonhuman primates can be. As our closest living relatives, their behavior is strikingly similar to our own. Primatology studies primate behavior. Biological anthropologists studying primates are interested in their social complexity and ecological and behavioral variation.
6.2: Sociality, Residency Patterns, and Dispersal
The majority of mammal species are solitary, with individuals living alone, except for mothers and dependent offspring. However, most primate species live in groups. Primate groups vary in size, composition, and cohesiveness. In this section, we’ll examine why primates live in groups and who stays, who goes, and why.
6.3: Reproductive Strategies
It is important to recognize that primate reproductive strategies have evolved to maximize individual reproductive success. These strategies are divided into those dealing with offspring production and care and those that maximize mating success. Female strategies focus on obtaining the food necessary to sustain a pregnancy and choosing the best male(s) to father offspring. Male strategies focus on obtaining access to receptive females.
6.4: Communication
In its most basic form, communication occurs when one individual (the sender) emits a signal that conveys information, which is detected by another individual. Primate communication comes in four forms: vocal, visual, olfactory, and tactile. Species vary in their reliance on each.
6.5: The Question of Future
It may be surprising in a chapter on nonhuman primates to see a discussion of culture. After all, culture is considered by many, including cultural anthropologists, to be a distinguishing characteristic of humans. Indeed, some anthropologists question claims of culture in primates and other animals. Definitions of animal culture focus on specific behaviors that are unique to one population.
6.6: End of Chapter Review
Discussion questions and key term definitions.
6.7: Meet the Author

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the editors for the opportunity to contribute to this open-source textbook. She thanks Stephanie Etting for her encouragement and support during the writing of this chapter. Her suggestions, along with comments made by two anonymous reviewers on an earlier version of this chapter, improved the final version considerably. Finally, she thanks all the primatologists who came before her, especially her advisor, Lynne A. Isbell, for their tireless efforts to understand the behavior and ecology of the living primates. Without their work, this chapter would not have been possible.