Abstract
Mothers are the most fundamental individuals for the survival and development of their immature offspring. Sex-biased dispersal has an effect on strong and long-lasting social bonding between mothers and their philopatric offspring. Nepotistic relationships are often seen in species with male-biased dispersal but less frequently in species with female-biased dispersal. Bonobos are unique among female-biased dispersal primates in that the females are codominant with males, exert influence on the mating opportunities of their mature sons, and tolerate each other regardless of relatedness. Few studies on bonobos have examined sex differences in social relationships between juveniles and their mothers, and how this relates to mother–son and female–female cooperative relationships amongst adults. We investigated whether the association index of juveniles with their mothers changed with age depending on the sex of the juveniles in parties of bonobos at Wamba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We found that female bonobos had decreased party associations with their mothers prior to their emigration from the natal group, while male bonobos maintained relatively high party associations with their mothers. These results indicate that sex differences that emerge during the juvenile period in bonobos in their spatial relationships with their mothers differ from previous findings on chimpanzees, spider monkeys, and muriquis, in which philopatric sons tend to spend less time in proximity to their mothers and disperse earlier than, or at a similar age to, daughters. The contrasts between bonobos and other primate species suggest that the high social status of female bonobos relative to that of males may facilitate the extension of maternal support for their philopatric sons, and that high tolerance among unrelated females may enable the spatial independence of daughters from their mothers at an earlier stage.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the Ministry of Scientific Research of the Democratic Republic of the Congo for permission to carry out our research on bonobos, and the Research Center for Ecology and Forestry in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for their support of our field studies in Luo Scientific Reserve. We are particularly grateful to local assistants for helping us with our field studies, and the villagers who allowed us to stay at Wamba. We sincerely thank the members of the Department of Ecology and Social Behavior at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University (KUPRI), in particular Drs. T. Bercovitch, T. Sakamaki, N. Tokuyama, A. Toyoda, and Mr. S. Ishizuka. We would also like to thank Mr. J. Alejandro J (KUPRI) for English language editing. Finally, we are extremely grateful to the two anonymous reviewers, and the associate editor of Primates, Dr. M. Nakamura, for their valuable comments and significant suggestions on earlier versions of this article. This study was financially supported (K. T.) by the Leading Program in Primatology and Wildlife Science of Kyoto University, a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (17J01336), and a Young Explorer’s Grant from the National Geographic Foundation for Science and Exploration (Asia 38-16).
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Toda, K., Ryu, H. & Furuichi, T. Age and sex differences in juvenile bonobos in party associations with their mothers at Wamba. Primates 62, 19–27 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-020-00853-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-020-00853-y