Socio-ecological Systems

Abstract

The key lessons that have emerged from the analyses of the individual components of primate socio-ecological systems are: (1) that birth and death rates are determined by an interaction between environmental, demographic and social factors; (2) that birth and death rates filter through the demographic system to determine the social milieu in which individuals develop, so influencing the social skills they learn as well as constraining their choices of social partners; (3) that an individual seeks to maximise its lifetime reproductive output by forming relationships with those individuals that will be of most value in furthering these ends; (4) that its choice of social partners is limited not only by demographic constraints on the availability of partners, but also by those partners’ own preferences for certain kinds of relationships; (5) that ecological and anti-predator strategies largely determine the way in which females are distributed and that this, in turn, determines what the males can do; and, finally (6) that primate social systems can be viewed as variations around a common theme (essentially, relationships between females).