Monkey Market
Paying for a cuddle
A month-old vervet monkey with distinctive dark baby fur clings to mom as a snuggles magnet for other females in the group in South Africa's Loskop Dam Nature Preserve
Do my hair before you touch my baby" is the rule among mother vervet monkeys and sooty mangabeys when it comes to sharing their infants with their neighbors. Like some other primate infants, monkey babies attract crowds of females eager to touch, hold and make silly lip-smacking noises at the little ones, says primatologist Cécile Fruteau of Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Her novel study of infant-touching etiquette in the vervets and mangabeys adds them to the short list of animals known to have "markets" for baby fondling. The moms have to be groomed for a sufficient time before they let the groomer touch the baby. What makes this exchange a market is the way sufficient grooming time changes with the baby supply, Fruteau and her colleagues explain in a paper now posted online in Animal Behaviour. The price for access to a group's solitary infant, measured in grooming time for mom, fell when other females gave birth and increased the number of little cuties available for cuddling. Price is sensitive to other variables as well, says Fruteau, who documented for the first time that age makes a difference in how much grooming a baby can bring to a mom. Newborns earn their mothers the longest grooming sessions. One newborn mangabey, for example, the only baby in its group at the time, earned about 10 minutes of fur cleaning and combing for its mom. In contrast another lone baby didn't even earn four minutes of grooming once it had reached the advanced age of almost 3 months. Researchers also found that grooming time correlated with access to vervet babies but not with the amount of fondling time permitted or the degree of familiarity allowed. With enough grooming, moms permitted pretty much any female in their group to at least touch or sniff the baby. But it was mostly females with a history of grooming mom, presumably the well-known and accepted associates, who could actually hold the baby themselves.
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