April 13, 2004
No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture
By NATALIE ANGIER

Sometimes it takes the great Dustbuster of fate to clear the room of bullies
and bad habits. Freak cyclones helped destroy Kublai Khan's brutal Mongolian
empire, for example, while the Black Death of the 14th century capsized the
medieval theocracy and gave the Renaissance a chance to shine.

Among a troop of savanna baboons in Kenya, a terrible outbreak of
tuberculosis 20 years ago selectively killed off the biggest, nastiest and
most despotic males, setting the stage for a social and behavioral
transformation unlike any seen in this notoriously truculent primate.

In a study appearing today in the journal PloS Biology (online at
www.plosbiology.org), researchers describe the drastic temperamental and
tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent
members vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant adult males
that had been strong and snarly enough to fight with a neighboring baboon
troop over the spoils at a tourist lodge garbage dump, and were exposed
there to meat tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which soon killed them. Left
behind in the troop, designated the Forest Troop, were the 50 percent of
males that had been too subordinate to try dump brawling, as well as all the
females and their young. With that change in demographics came a cultural
swing toward pacifism, a relaxing of the usually parlous baboon hierarchy,
and a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming rather than threats,
swipes and bites to foster a patriotic spirit.

Remarkably, the Forest Troop has maintained its genial style over two
decades, even though the male survivors of the epidemic have since died or
disappeared and been replaced by males from the outside. (As is the case for
most primates, baboon females spend their lives in their natal home, while
the males leave at puberty to seek their fortunes elsewhere.) The
persistence of communal comity suggests that the resident baboons must
somehow be instructing the immigrants in the unusual customs of the tribe.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/13BABO.html?8hpib

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek.
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