A twenty‐year study of long‐term and temporary dominance relations among stumptailed macaques (Macaca arctoides)

Abstract

Consistent individual differences in long-term dominance are a basic underlying assumption of hypotheses linking dominance and reproductive success. Long-term and temporary dominance of a colony group of sturnptailed macaques was studied for 20 years. There were two variously constituted groups for the first 4 years and a single group for the last 16.Stumptails displayed the matrilineal dominance organization found for several other cercopithecine species. A method was devised to standardize ranks so they could be compared over the years across groups of varying size and composition. No animal maintained the same dominance rank over the entire period of the research or over the last 16 years, but there was considerable consistency over long periods. Although occupants of the male and female alpha positions changed several times, one female was dominant for 18 of the 20 years. She was dominant in 1968, a t the start of the study, and at its end in 1988 a t which time her 18-year-old son was the dominant male. Variation in dominance ranks was greatest among members of mid-ranking matrilines and least for the lowest ranking. The same female or her son were the lowest ranking animals of their groups in all samples taken over the entire 20 years.

Intermediate-term emotional bookkeeping is necessary for long-term reciprocal grooming partner preferences in an agent-based model of macaque groups

“…Individuals are characterized by their dominance strength (myDOM) which ranges from 0.05 (lowest ranking) to 1 (highest ranking individual), which does not change over time or after interactions ( Bryson, Ando & Lehmann, 2007 ; Evers et al, 2011 ; Evers et al, 2012 ; Evers et al, 2014 ). This represents stable dominance ranks, that often last for extended periods and form the typical situation in macaque groups ( Bernstein, 1969 ; Silk, 1988 ; Rhine, Cox & Costello, 1989 ; Ostner, Heistermann & Schülke, 2008 ). Individuals differ in their scheduled time (myTIME), their current scanning probability (myPscan) and in the current width of the view angle (myVIEW˙ANGLE), which change dynamically over the course of the simulation.…”

Lifetime reproductive success of female mountain gorillas

“…The standardized rank of each female equals the proportion of other females that are below her in the matrix, so the lowest female in each matrix has a standardized rank of ''0,'' and most dominant female has a standardized rank of ''1'' (for similar approaches see Rhine et al, 1989;Cote, 2000). The overall standardized rank for each female was calculated as the average of all measured values throughout her adulthood.…”

Interactions with humans impose time constraints on urban-dwelling rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)

“…From the dyadic dominance interactions with decided winner-loser outcome, we calculated dominance rank using the Perc package in R (Fujii et al, 2015), which calculates dyadic dominance relationships on the basis of both direct interactions and multiple indirect pathways (for more details see Fushing et al, 2011). In order to control for group size, we followed previous approaches (e.g., Rhine et al, 1989) and standardized dominance rank as follows:…”