Aggressive behavior helps male chimpanzees climb the social ladder throughout their lives. article about it published at PeerJ.
Chimpanzees are known for their brutality and aggressive behavior. They can kill a relative during a conflict, and dominant individuals regularly suppress the weaker ones. At the same time, it is not clear to zoologists why not all individuals show aggression.
Zoologists from Edinburgh University and Duke University decided to observe 28 male chimpanzees living in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. In previous studies, the same team of authors found that chimpanzees are very individualistic, with social and solitary animals that are both good-natured and prone to fighting among themselves. The authors assessed the monkeys’ personality based on years of field observation of how each chimpanzee behaves and interacts with other chimpanzees.
It turned out that individuals with an aggressive character and not prone to conscientious behavior achieve greater success and move towards the top of the social hierarchy. Such hypotheses had existed before, and thus biologists were confused: if aggressive behavior was so beneficial, why did nonaggressive individuals remain in the population? They have long tried to explain this by the fact that different behaviors work at different stages of life, roughly speaking, being aggressive in youth and calm in adulthood.
The current study refutes this hypothesis – aggressive behavior helped males dominate and achieve reproductive success throughout their lives. Therefore, the existence of different types of characters is an evolutionary mystery – for comparison, the elephant seal is also distinguished by aggression and a tendency to dominate in an effort to capture as many females as possible, although there are no good-natured individuals among them. none. The authors suggest that non-aggressive behavior may be beneficial under certain social or environmental conditions, or may be beneficial for women if these traits cannot be biologically shared between the two sexes.
Scientists hope that further observations will solve this mystery.