Female choices and male reproductive success in Guinea baboons
Institute Seminar by Julia Fischer
- Date: Dec 17, 2024
- Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Julia Fischer
- Julia Fischer is Professor of Primate Cognition at the University of Göttingen and head of the Cognitive Ethology Laboratory at the German Primate Centre. Her research centers on the social behaviour, communication and cognition of nonhuman primates. She obtained her Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin in 1996. After postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvania and the MPI for evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, she was appointed in Göttingen. With her team, she established the Simenti field station in Senegal, where she studies Guinea baboons. She is a member of the Leopoldina (German National Academy of Sciences), the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, as well as a recipient of the Lower Saxony Order of Merit. In 2013, she received the Werner and Inge Grüter Prize for Science Communication and in 2023 the Werner Heisenberg Medal from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is currently Vice President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
- Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
- Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
- Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
- Contact: ukalbitzer@ab.mpg.de
Guinea baboons live in a multi-level society with units comprising one reproductively active “primary” male and a number of females and their young. Females show high leverage in mate choice and may freely transfer between different males. I will present a series of studies that examined female choices, using long-term data and the outcomes of field experiments from our CRP Simenti project in Senegal. Reproductive skew among males is low and male rank confers only a small reproductive advantage. Females do not exhibit preferences for males that have many friends, but aggressively monopolize males whose foraging abilities are experimentally enhanced. Overall, the key determinant of male reproductive success appears to be male longevity. I will discuss the variation in the determinants of male reproductive success in different baboon species against the background of the striking variation in their social systems and their phylogenetic history.
The MPI-AB Seminar Series is open to members of MPI and Uni Konstanz. The zoom link is published each week in the MPI-AB newsletter.