Question

List 3 types of primate social structures with a brief description.

Answer 1

Ans.

• Most of the primates species including human live in large social groups or communities.
• Members of those social groups communicate with each other, coordinate their activities and show friendly as well as agonistic behaviors.
• Group life has it's own challenges, for eg. competition for natural resources and mates.
• Despite of challenges and cost of social living, these animals still choose sociality due to many reasons such as protection from predators and more availabality of food and water.
• Primates have develop different social structures such as;

1). One female multi-male groups -

• This primate structure is a characteristic of many marmosets and tamarins and co-operative breeding is a feature of this struture.
• Usually, only one female breeds in this system and that female through aggression or pheromonal signal supressess any subordinate females reproduction.
• Because of the presence of more then one male, this is a polyandrous system.
• This system is often called as cooperative polyandry as most of the individual of these groups take care of offspring.

2). Solitary dispersed social system -

• It is a characteristic system of the least gregarious primates.
• In these systems, territory of an adult male overlaps with the territory of more then one adult females but every individual encoarches alone, and use vocal or olfactory communications for social contact.
• Such primates are mostly nocturnal in nature, which forage in night and sleeps in days.
• This system adopt a polygynous mating system i.e. each male mates with mutiple females.
• Galagos, lorises and some lemurs are known for this social system.

3). Pair-bonded social system -

• A small social group is formed by an adult male and an adult female and they defend their territory from other pairs.
• In these groups, only one male mates with one female only (i.e. monogamous mating system) and male take care of offspring.
• Some extra-pair copulations have also been noticed in these groups.
• Some primates which represent this structure include Titi monkeys, owl monkeys, many hylobatids and some callitrichids.