BOISE, IDAHO--Female baboons love to talk about sex, particularly when it's good. Biologists have been baffled by this bawdy habit, but new research suggests that the ladies may have a good reason for being so forthcoming.
Lots of animals call, sing, or whistle to advertise fertility, attract a mate, or spur competition among members of the opposite sex. But most creatures don't have much to say once the deed is done. Female baboons are an exception. After mating, females often give loud staccato grunts. Scientists observing wild baboons noticed that females tend to call more after sex with a higher-ranking, dominant male. The researchers thought the noisy females were trying to encourage more males to compete for a roll in the hay. The truth may be quite the opposite, according to behavioral biologist Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago.
Maestripieri and a team of biologists hoped to discover what the baboons were really talking about by watching what happened after they had sex. The team studied a captive group of Guinea baboons at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago for 3 months and found that instead of persuading more males to mate, a female's calls put off potential suitors. The grunts are actually meant to convince the male she just had sex with to stick around afterward, Maestripieri told the Animal Behavior Society meeting here on 20 July. Once a female baboon mates with a preferred male, it is in her best interest to give that male's sperm the best chance to fertilize her eggs by avoiding further copulation. Males comply by guarding a female that's grunted. This tactic gives female baboons--who would otherwise be at the mercy of the much larger males--a bit of a say in who fathers their babies, says Maestripieri.
"It's definitely a different and novel take on post-copulation calls," says Fred Bercovitch, a behavioral biologist at the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species at the San Diego Zoo. But more work needs to be done, such as keeping track of whether the calls actually decrease the number of males a female mates with during her most fertile days, before Bercovitch will be convinced the behavior has an adaptive purpose.
Related sites
Dario
Maestripieri's research
Brookfield Zoo
Center for
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