Female sexual swellings in the Asian colobine Simias concolor
✍ Scribed by Richard R. Tenaza
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1989
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 436 KB
- Volume
- 17
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0275-2565
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✦ Synopsis
During a preliminary study of pig-tailed langurs (Simias concolor) in the Pagai Islands, Indonesia, it was discovered that females exhibited conspicuous swelling of the urogenital triangle. The pig-tailed langur is the first Asiatic colobine found to have prominent sexual swellings and the only colobine with sexual swellings that lives in one-male groups. Because all anthropoids with conspicuous sex skin typically live in groups having female-biased adult sex ratios, it is possible that females might compete amongst themselves for the male in one-male groups, or the best males in multimale groups. Sexual swellings may therefore have resulted from sexual selection for signals attractive to males in female-female competition, as suggested earlier by Bercovitch (California Anthropologist 8:9-12, 1978). Prolonged observation of recognizable individuals will be required to test this hypothesis in the pig-tailed langur and other species.