Abstract
The hypothesis that skin care is an important function of allogrooming in primates was evaluated in the light of data on its physical distribution in a wide range of species. It was found that the distribution of autogrooming (assumed to be primarily utilitarian) and allogrooming over 17 body sites were complementary and that allogrooming was concentrated on areas which are inaccessible and/or invisible to an autogrooming animal. However, within accessible and inaccessible site categories, allogrooming was evenly distributed over the body surface, despite any special social or communicatory significance that particular sites may have. Intertaxonomic differences in the distributions of both types of grooming, notably between anthropoids and lemurs, lent further support to the notion of complementarity. It was concluded that the data support previous suggestions linking allogrooming site preferences with a utilitarian function, analytic and methodological differences being the probable explanation for discrepancies between these results and those obtained in another study.
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Barton, R. Grooming site preferences in primates and their functional implications. Int J Primatol 6, 519–532 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02735574
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02735574