From the Field
The Leakey Foundation awarded Alecia Carter a Leakey Foundation research grant in the spring of 2016 for her project entitled โConstraints on the evolution of culture: Social information in Namibian baboons.โ To read a summary of her project, please click here. Below she updates us on her 2016 field season.
This field season was the toughest Iโve ever had: itโs a drought in Namibia (see Figure 1), and the desert baboons we study are suffering because of this. One troop has split into twoโfifteen individuals of our larger, 80+ strong-group attempted to, unsuccessfully, join our other study troop. Three adult males, two older females and a juvenile female are missing; females who were pregnant when we left last year no longer are; several individuals are in terrible condition, rarely able to follow the troop when they range long distances to forage; and everyone is eating barkโthereโs little else to eat.
One of the consequences of this extreme year of the natural variation in the baboonsโ environment was predictable: the baboons spread very far apart when foraging. Now, for a researcher interested in the transmission of social information among individuals, this presents a bit of a problem. How is one to study social information transmission if the baboons are not being โsocialโ very often?
My motivation for studying the flow of information in baboons groups is to better understand the constraints on the formation of culture in primates. Baboons are a highly gregarious primate that readily learns from othersโso why do they rarely have โculturalโ behaviours, which rely on the transmission of information among individuals? This year, I aimed to experimentally establish some new behavioursโeating a novel food (Figure 2)โin the groups to figure out when and where information stops spreading: is it particular individuals that donโt watch others? Or some individuals that do watch others but then donโt use that social information? Or is it something to do with the structure of the groupโthe social network (see Figure 3)? Perhaps the individuals that use social information associate only with others that also use information, resulting in the ones that need to watch others rarely having opportunities to do so because they donโt associate with them.
At least, that was the plan. But the drought has made this difficult. I had to scale back my plans (one new behaviour instead of two), and have greater-than-usual patience when doing this experiment (Figure 4). But, eventually, it worked! First, a few individuals ate the novel food. Over the next weeks, I patiently presented the food to the small groups of baboons that I could find (Figure 5), aiming to get individuals who havenโt eaten the food to watch individuals who do eat the food. Slowly, individuals start to learn that the novel food is edible by watching othersโbut others donโt. Now itโs onto the analyses to find out whether there is something particular about the innovators, learners and non-learners.
