When I first saw this beautiful image of geladas, I thought it was two males mourning a dead comrade. But after reading the caption, boy was I ever wrong. What’s happening here is grooming. I wanted to share this photo with you because grooming is one of the most common behavioral features between all primates, and has made us all into the highly social organisms we are.
© iStockphoto/IMPALASTOCK
From Scientific American’s Photo Gallery,
“Like other intelligent, highly social primates, baboon courtship can take many different forms. In hamadryas baboons, for instance, males will maintain harems of multiple females which they will jealously guard—and which will occasionally be raided by other males. Males of other baboon species sometimes take a different tack: by “befriending” a female through attentive companionship and grooming (the primate equivalent of sparkling conversation) they may eventually be chosen as mates by those females.”
6 Comments
April 16, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Nice blog!
April 16, 2007 at 6:16 pm
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptI wanted to share this photo with you because grooming is one of the most common behavioral features between all primates, and has made us all into the highly social organisms we are. Baboon’s grooming © iStockphoto/IMPALASTOCK … [...]
April 21, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Err… aren’t those gelada baboons?
April 21, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Hai~~Ren, your guess is good as mine. I’m calling them Hamadryas baboons because, where I swiped the image from, Scientific American calls them that.
August 24, 2007 at 7:20 am
Yes, they are geladas. The photo is especially interesting because two males are grooming a female. The one-male unit is basic to the species, but leaders sometimes tolerate young adult followers.
January 10, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Hai~~Ren is definitely correct. Geladas are a different species. Papio hamadyas would be a different color with a pink face, males having striking manes. The monkeys in the picture are not baboons at all. Still a good picture though.