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To fission or to fusion: effects of community size on wild chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) social organisation

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Abstract

To balance advantages and disadvantages of group living, some species have fission-fusion social systems in which members of the same group form frequently changing subgroups. This allows flexible responses of group size to external conditions while at the same time retaining group stability. In chimpanzees, subgroup (party) size and composition depend mainly on the presence of receptive females, food availability and the activity of the party. Here we analyse the extent to which fission-fusion parameters are influenced by changes of demographic variables like community size and composition. Data were collected from a habituated West African chimpanzee community (Taï forest, Côte d’Ivoire) over 10 years, during which total community size decreased from 51 to 21, and the number of adult males decreased from 9 to 2. Taï chimpanzees are highly gregarious, as they spend more than 80% of their time with unrelated conspecifics. With decreasing community size, party size, party duration and male-female association increased. Neither activity nor the presence of receptive females or feeding competition could explain the observed changes in grouping patterns. Thus, the decrease in community size led to an increase of party cohesion and also enhanced cohesiveness between the sexes, while general sociality remained unchanged. Therefore, our data support the notion that small communities are more cohesive and have a less flexible fission-fusion system.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Ministère de la Recherche Scientifique, the Ministère de l’Agriculture et des Ressources Animales and the directors of the Taï National Park of Côte d’Ivoire for supporting the research in the Taï National Park. We are grateful for the support provided by the Centre Suisse in Abidjan. For financial support, we would like to thank the Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique and the Max Planck Society. Further, we would like to thank the field assistants, Grégoire Kohou Nohon and Honorar Néné Kpazahi, who collected most of the data presented here, for their invaluable help. We would also like to thank Maik Thraenert for his help with the database creation and six student helpers for typing in all the data, and Linda Vigilant, Laurent Lacroix and Daniel Stahl for valuable discussions.

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  1. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 , Leipzig, Germany

    Julia Lehmann & Christophe Boesch

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  1. Julia Lehmann
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  2. Christophe Boesch
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Correspondence to Julia Lehmann.

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Communicated by D. Watts

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Lehmann, J., Boesch, C. To fission or to fusion: effects of community size on wild chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) social organisation. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 56, 207–216 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-004-0781-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-004-0781-x

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