Gender differences in caring for infant Cebuella pygmaea: The role of infant age and relatedness
✍ Scribed by Marianne Z. Wamboldt; Robert E. Gelhard; Thomas R. Insel
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1988
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 1008 KB
- Volume
- 21
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0012-1630
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This paper describes a three-part study of the parenting behaviors of 6 family groups of Cebuella pygmaea (pygmy marmosets). In the first part, the parenting patterns of undisturbed family groups housed under laboratory conditions were scored throughout the first 10 weeks following the birth of their second infant(s). To further investigate the role of infant age in determining parental behavior, caretaking patterns were studied after a brief separation of infants of varying ages from their families. Finally, an unrelated infant, age 1-5 weeks, was placed inside the home cage of each family, and caretaking of this novel infant was scored. The main findings that emerged from the study were: (1) sex differences in carrying the infants were dependent upon the age of the infant, i.e., adult females were the predominant carriers of infants 5 3 weeks of age and males (either adult or juvenile) the main carriers for infants >3 weeks of age; (2) some caretaking behaviors, e.g., grooming and protective retrieval, were performed predominantly by the adult females throughout infancy; and (3) the relatedness of the infant, i.e., one's own vs. another's, appeared to primarily affect the behavior of adult females. In general, experimental manipulations confirmed results of the observational part of the study and thus may be useful paradigms for testing specific hypotheses about parental behaviors.
One of the intriguing characteristics of all species of Callithrichidae studied thus far is their pattern of sharing parental duties amongst all members of the family group, including the parental pair, their older offspring, and often one or two unrelated, subdominant males (Christen, 1974;. All of these individuals have been noted to carry, groom, and clean the young, as well as share food with them as they are weaned. Although some earlier reviews on the reproductive patterns of