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Bshary, Redouan

Nom
Bshary, Redouan
Affiliation principale
Fonction
Professeur ordinaire
Email
redouan.bshary@unine.ch
Identifiants
https://libra.unine.ch/handle/123456789/343
_
0000-0001-7198-8472

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  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Negotiations over Grooming in Wild Vervet Monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus)
    Van de Waal, Erica
    ;
    Spinelli, Martina
    ;
    Bshary, Redouan 
    ;
    Ros, Albert Frank Huascar
    ;
    Noë, Ronald
    Mutual grooming plays a central role in the establishment and maintenance of social relationships in primates. Allogrooming has two main functions: hygiene and bonding with partners. The duration of grooming bouts is commonly used in studies of the functional aspects of grooming, but few reflect on the proximate mechanisms that determine grooming bout lengths. As it is highly unlikely that groomer and groomee prefer exactly the same bout length, we are likely to observe the result of some form of negotiation. We currently lack information about the signals that primates employ to inform others about their intentions and desires concerning grooming interactions. From October 2006 until April 2007 we studied three behaviors shown in grooming interactions that could potentially have a signaling function in the negotiation process over the initiation and length of grooming bouts among adult females of two vervet groups freely ranging in the Loskop Dam Nature Reserve, South Africa: approaching another individual as far as that resulted in a grooming session, changing of the body position by the groomed individual, and lip smacking. We found that “approach” did not reliably predict which individual would receive grooming first, although approaching individuals groomed significantly more than those approached. Thus, in the context of grooming interactions, moving toward a group member may signal the willingness to invest. Body part presentations appeared to be the main signal used to demand a prolongation of the grooming by the partner. Finally, lip smacking was used under potentially stressful circumstances, notably shortly before using the mouth to groom the partner or an attempt to touch a mother’s infant. Our exploratory study hopefully inspires colleagues to start looking at the role of communication during cooperative interactions for a better appreciation of how animals manage cooperation and negotiate exchange rates.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Wild vervet monkey infants acquire the food-processing variants of their mothers
    Van de Waal, Erica
    ;
    Bshary, Redouan 
    ;
    Whiten, Andrew
    In the ability and motivation to copy others, social learning has been shown to provide a mechanism for the inheritance of behavioural traditions. Major questions remain about the circumstances and models that shape such social learning. Here, we demonstrate that behavioural food-processing variants among wild vervet monkey, Chlorocebus aethiops, mothers are matched by their infants in their first manipulative approaches to a new foraging problem. In our field experiment, grapes covered with sand were provisioned within groups of wild vervet monkeys that included experienced adults and 17 naïve infants. Monkeys dealt with the dirty food in four different ways. All infants first adopted their mother's way of handling the grapes, rather than those of other mothers or other monkeys eating nearby. Mothers who handled grapes in different ways had infants who were more likely to explore different approaches to handle the sandy grapes. Rarer cases of co-feeding siblings further suggest that copying may occur on the matriline level. Our findings suggest a capacity for detailed copying by infants of their mothers' and matriline members' food- processing techniques when encountering new foods, underlining the significance of familial models in such primate social groups.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Differences in Diet Between Six Neighbouring Groups of Vervet Monkeys
    Tournier, Emilie
    ;
    Tournier, Virginia
    ;
    Van de Waal, Erica
    ;
    Barrett, Alan
    ;
    Brown, Leslie
    ;
    Bshary, Redouan 
    The comparative approach provides a powerful tool to study evolutionary questions on both intra- and interspecific variation. It has been applied to a great variety of taxa, including primates. Primate studies differ from those on most other taxa in two ways: first, data from most study sites contain information about only one group. Second, primatologists have used the comparative approach also to identify local traditions, that is, behaviours that spread through social learning. Here, we evaluate the appropriateness of such data by comparing the diet composition of six neighbouring groups of vervet monkeys, Cercopithecus aethiops. We used scan samples to collect diet data, and abundance measures and phenology to assess the availability of the 14 most important tree species utilised during the study. We calculated indices of diet overlap, which were highly variable and could be remarkably low. Furthermore, we found significant differences between group diets with respect to the relative utilisation of 13 of the 14 tree species. For all 13 species, we found positive correlations between local abundance and appearance in the diet, consistent with the importance of local ecology for diet composition. Nevertheless, more detailed comparisons of pairs of groups often revealed significant mismatches between the relative importance of a tree species and its local abundance. In conclusion, local variation merits increased attention by primatologists. While our results are compatible with the possibility that traditions exist on a local (group) rather than population scale, alternative explanations have to be considered.