Each day in the field I am surprised by the astounding behaviors I see my little monkey friends do! First, I had expected that infant handling in this species would be much friendlier and more affiliative than I have witnessed in the past few months. Although most of the time it is quite nice, as young and adult females frequently hold each others’ babies in a caring manner, I have also seen some very aggressive behaviors preformed by adult males and females towards young colobus babies. On several occasions I witnessed adult females bite the heads of infants! I’ve also seen them cuff, nip, grab and pull harshly, kick, and hit young white and grey infants! Although I’ve seen Don Quixote hold baby Obama gently in his lap for almost a minute, he has also nipped and cuffed another infant (Remus) after which he practically forced Remus’ lactating mother to copulate with him! I know rape occurs in many primates, not just in our own species, it is still quite surprising to witness.
Secondly, although I need to confirm this with a heavy duty Scope lens, I’m certain that I’ve witnessed allonursing behaviors several times in one of my study groups. This is super cool to see as it isn’t all that common! Allonursing is when a lactating female nurses an infant that is not her own.
Thirdly, my ethogram (an exhaustive list of behavioral codes describing everything an observer should expect a colobus monkey to do) seems to lack codes for a few of the creepy and sometimes shocking social behaviors I am seeing:
We need a new code for that!
1. After an adult female aggressively bit the head of one my study infants (my heart stopped each time this ever happened and I wanted to lunge through the bushes towards the mean female … but I didn’t … of course), several juvenile monkeys took turns approaching the baby and licking his head, on the spot where he was bitten. This was sweet to witness but a bit puzzling as there wasn’t any visible sign of blood anywhere on the infant.
SU = Social Lick Head
2. On the other end of the biting spectrum, I have seen individual infant handlers playfully nibble and gently bite the body of young infants. This is cute to witness, but once again, I found I had not prepared a code for this affiliative interaction.
SZ = Social Nibble
3. When adult males jump display and try to show off their muscles and strength to other males, usually during inter-group encounters, infants tend to get incredibly excited. They jump on top of the raging males, waving their tails around like pinwheels and squealing like the pig on Christmas. It’s a strange for infants to do this because you would imagine that they frequently get injured in the process. The adaptive advantage of infants’ involvement in the dangerous jump displays of large males is not apparent to me. I thought that maybe those males that have the most infants to scream and make noise as they display would appear to be the most physically fit and reproductively successful to extra-group males, who may get intimidated by them …?? All in all infants look really dumb participating in this. On one occasion I did see a really funny thing. In between the jump-displaying bout of Gordon, the alpha male of group Odum, a small grey infant named Nietzsche jumped in his lap and began touching his face and mouth to his semi-erect penis. This lasted for several seconds and was repeated a few times by Nietzsche and as I watched with my mouth wide open in complete astonishment at what I was seeing, let alone try to make sense of it, I found that I did not have a behavioral code in my ethogram to describe this behavior.
SH = Social Head to Penis
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