For adulterous wife to protect children

The leading baboons allow their wives to mate with some bad guys, considering it a way to protect their children.

This is the conclusion of Louise Barrett, a scientist from Lethbridge University, Canada. According to New Zealand, Barrett and his colleagues studied a population of chacma baboons ( Papio ursinus ) in the De Hoop conservation area in South Africa.

Chacma baboons, one of the largest monkeys in the world, has a very specialized social structure. Each male has a male as the leader. It has the right to mate with all female monkeys in the herd. When the females enter ovulation, they are always closely monitored by the leader. But in the chacma baboon that Barrett watched, the leader only fathered 41 of the 64 baby monkeys. He did not understand why it happened when the leader always supervised his 'wives'.

Subsequent observations showed that the males in the herd had mated with the leaders' wives. This happens not because the male head is too busy, tired or inexperienced in watching the females. Instead, the leader ignored the sight of the female monkeys mating with other males.

Chacma monkeys have a very strict social structure.Photo: salon.com.

According to Barrett, it is no coincidence that the monkeys become generous with male monkeys. In fact it was a tactic to protect the leader's cubs every time it was absent. Normally, when the first leader dies, is injured or goes away, a new leader will appear (usually from another monkey herd). Usually the first male kills all the young in the herd so that the female monkeys have to give birth to it. But if there are other male monkeys in the herd, they risk their lives to protect them. Then the old leader's children will also be protected.

Barrett found that boars were more likely to stick to the herd (an average of 23 months), while males without descendants lived only in the herd for about 5 months.

Time to live with longer flocks allows male monkeys to build closer relationships with females. The closer the relationship with the female monkey is, the more the male monkey tries to protect the females and the offspring if the new leader intends to slaughter.

'If a male monkey is in a low position and is not a father, he will have no incentive to build relationships with female monkeys , ' Barrett explained.

The monkeys' tactics for "adulterous wives" seem to have worked. Barrett found that only one baby monkey was killed when the monkey he studied had a new leader.