Chimpanzee Bonds: Strong Ties Among Male Chimps Lead Them to Successfully Find Their Mate, Sire Offspring

Researchers recently revealed that the main job of a male chimpanzee is to gain reproductive access to female chimps and eventually produce offspring. Strong social bonds with fellow male chimps play a vital role, too, in fulfilling the task.

As indicated in a Phys.org report, research led by the University of Michigan, in collaboration with Arizona State and Duke universities, studied the reason male chimpanzees are forming close links to each other and discovered that male chimpanzees that develop strong bonds with the group's alpha male, or a large network of other males, are more successful at siring offspring.

According to Joseph Feldblum, the study's lead author and U-M postdoctoral researcher, one big question that biologists have been asking for quite some time now is why so many friendly behaviors are observed like "alliance and cooperation in animals."

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Social Bonds in Chimpanzees

The lead author also said, one would expect to see such social bonds, or strong, friendly social associations, only if they offer some fitness benefit.

He added that males would not spend all this time grooming other males "and forgoing" in search of female chimpanzees or food unless "you get some benefit from it."

One advantage would be the opportunity of siring more offspring although, no previous research has looked at the association between social bonds and reproductive success in chimpanzees.

Much of the study in this particular area has been performed in female primates, who are mainly concerned with accessing resources to reproduce rapidly.

For male chimpanzees, explained Feldblum, the biggest job is to get reproductive access to female chimpanzees. He added that chimpanzees often cooperate, and most of the time, in remarkably dramatic ways, like seeing things such as grooming, multifaceted formation of the alliance, and group territorial defense.

What Male Chimps Get Out of the Bonding and How

This report said it turns out; male chimpanzees are getting babies. The research team discovered. One function of these social bonds is to help male chimps access mating opportunities they would not otherwise be able to attain, minus help from their friends.

ASU News specified in its report that to investigate the link between paternity and sociality success, the study investigators observed behavioral and genetic data from a chimpanzee population living in western Tanzania.

The said group is part of the ongoing research on chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, started in 1960 by Jane Goodall.

The study authors started by developing a base model that catches the impacts of male age, dominance rank, and genetic likeness to the mother on the success of male siring.

They initially used the model to investigate 56 siring occurrences with known paternity from 1980 to 2014. As a result, they discovered that males with stronger association ties, those with the highest number of social bonds with other male chimpanzees, had a higher probability of siring offspring.

Strong Ties

In this present study, Social bonds provide multiple pathways to reproductive success in wild male chimpanzees, published in iScience; the research team showed that male chimpanzees forming ties are more likely to form coalitions too, and the scientists hypothesize that this larger association network helps male chimps get opportunities for mating.

The researchers found too that forming these numerous strong bonds results in the improvement of chimps in terms of rank within the group. These are those the ones who have made it to the alpha position, which was more possible to sire offspring, as well.

A more vibrant idea of these benefits of social ties in chimpanzees offers hints about the evolution of friendship in humans.

Chimpanzees, along with bonobos, are humans' closest living relatives and help identify which features of human social life are distinctive.

Related information about chimpanzees is shown on BBC Reel's YouTube video below: