An adult male and infant baboon in the Amboseli ecosystem, Kenya.
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The mammal world is —at least by human standards. In most mammalian species, males saddle the mother with their offspring while they continue to galavant around and sire more. That’s how male baboons typically operate. But although these primate patriarchs don’t nurse young or gather food (or provide any other essential care), a new study suggests their presence does have a beneficial impact.
In a paper published on Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers report that female baboons who have strong relationships with their father—as measured by the amount of time a father-daughter pair spent grooming each other and living together—tend to outlive those who don’t. Of the 216 females in the study (all from Kenya’s Amboseli ecosystem, where the Amboseli Baboon Research Project has been running since 1971), those with an engaged father enjoyed an extra two to four years of life.
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Why are some baboon fathers more involved in their daughters’ lives than others? The answer may be linked to the studied species’ promiscuous practices: in the Amboseli population, both sexes have multiple mating partners, so paternity isn’t always clear-cut. As expected, the researchers found that males spent more time grooming young females when they were confident they were in fact the father. (That’s a call male baboons can realistically make: females’ genitals swell and turn red during ovulation, so if a male mates with one and fends off competitors until that sign of fertility disappears, he can be reasonably sure that any resulting offspring is his.) In the study, the males also seemed to play a more active parenting role when mating opportunities trailed off. Once you’re too old to compete with the swaggering young bucks for mates, Archie says, “the best strategy is to invest more in your offspring.”
This “dad mode,” as she calls it, is a powerful thing. Its significance in baboons resonates with our intuitions about the value of paternal care in our own species. Indeed, Archie thinks these findings from an evolutionary cousin may reveal something about the roots of human parenting. The big message, she says, is that “having a strong relationship with your parents is important for leading a long, healthy life. That seems to be a primate universal.”
Cody Cottier is a freelance journalist based in Fort Collins, Colo.
Source: www.scientificamerican.com