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Females Move in Tight Crowds, Males Roam: Socioecology and Movement Ecology of Mandrills

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Movement Ecology of Afrotropical Forest Mammals

Abstract

Mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx) have a unique social system for primates, with huge groups of hundreds of individuals and males moving in and out of the group seasonally. Despite intensive field studies conducted at several sites in the Congo Basin rainforests, the mechanisms and adaptation of their social organization are still poorly understood. How do groups maintain their huge size while moving around in the forest with poor visibility? How do solitary males find groups in the vast forests? And what are the adaptive advantages of these behaviors? In this review, I summarize what we know surrounding these questions and compare mandrill ecology with that of Neotropical social mammals, offering potential explanations for these questions. Group crowdedness and frequent exchange of long-distance calls could be keys to the collective movement of large groups that engage in regular subgrouping. The adaptive benefits of the large group size possibly lie in female tactics relating to infanticide avoidance and polyandrous mating. While very little is known about how solitary males find groups at the onset of the mating season, the adaptive function of their seasonal influxes can be relatively well explained as foraging and mating tactics. Since the major questions of mandrill social organization are strongly related to their movement ecology, intensive movement research using GPS telemetries and remote sensing is crucially needed to disentangle the social system of this intriguing monkey. Further, broader comparisons among the social movement of rainforest mammals will be essential to comprehensively understand their movement ecology.

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Acknowledgments

I appreciate the Institut de Recherche en Écologie Tropicale (IRET) for the long-lasting collaboration. Etienne François Akomo-Okoue and Fred Loïque Mindonga-Nguelet worked with me for long-term camera trapping. I am also grateful to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique et Technologique (CENAREST) and Agence National de Parcs Nationaux (ANPN) in Gabon for the permission to conduct the study. I sincerely thank all researchers, staff, and field assistants of the PROCOBHA project for providing advice and assistance. Namely, no work of mine would have been possible without the help and cooperation of Yoshihiro Nakashima, Yuji Takenoshita, Shiho Fujita, Chieko Ando, and Juichi Yamagiwa. My gratitude also goes to Rafael Reyna-Hurtado, Colin Chapman, and Mario Melletti for inviting me to contribute to this exciting edited volume. Jessica Rothman and an anonymous reviewer provided many constructive comments on an earlier version of this chapter. Lastly, I express my sincere appreciation and condolences to Jiro Hoshino, a Japanese pioneer in mandrill research who passed away in June 2022. My studies on mandrills in the Moukalaba-Doudou National Park were funded by JSPS KAKENHI (grant numbers JP19107007 and JP12J01884), Kyoto University Global COE Program (A06), and JST/JICA-SATREPS (PROCOBHA).

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  1. The Center for African Area Studies, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Shun Hongo

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  1. Shun Hongo
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Correspondence to Shun Hongo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biodiversity Conservation, El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, Campeche, Campeche, Mexico

    Rafael Reyna-Hurtado

  2. Biology Department, Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC, Canada

    Colin A. Chapman

  3. Wild Pig Specialist Group, IUCN SSC, African Buffalo Initiative Group IUCN, ASG, Rome, Italy

    Mario Melletti

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Hongo, S. (2023). Females Move in Tight Crowds, Males Roam: Socioecology and Movement Ecology of Mandrills. In: Reyna-Hurtado, R., Chapman, C.A., Melletti, M. (eds) Movement Ecology of Afrotropical Forest Mammals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27030-7_10

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