Abstracts of Presentations, Twenty-Second Annual Meeting, The American Society of Primatologists

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 147 KB
• Volume: 49
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0275-2565
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1098-2345(1999)49:1<103::aid-ajp7>3.0.co;2-9

✦ Synopsis

Infanticide was observed for the first time in a wild troop of Japanese macaques. The infanticide was not consistent with the social pathology, cannibalism, resource defense, or offspring manipulation hypotheses, but was generally consistent with the sexual selection hypothesis. The infanticide took place in mid-breeding season during a 1.5 year study in which JS collected over 500 and RT over 1000 hrs of focal data on adult troop members. The infanticidal male was an adult resident who experienced a sudden rise in dominance rank. He was not observed to mate with the mother of the victim in the previous mating season. Although the victim was a nursing infant, its mother did not mate in the month following its death. In fact, mating by group females had ceased one month before the infanticide. Previous research shows that in poor fruit years, birth rate decreases, and the year of the infanticide was an exceptionally poor fruit year. Thus, the infanticidal strategy may have failed because of an intervening environmental variable which inhibited female reproductive function. We tested the hypothesis that females use matings to avoid infanticide. Males (n=11) attacked infants less often when they had previously mated with the mother, but the difference was not significant (p=0.128). These observations support a growing body of evidence that sexually selected infanticide may not be limited to 1-male primate groups.