Matt Walker, Editor, Earth News
Male, female and infant yellow baboons in Amboseli, Kenya
What are platonic friends for?
Male and female baboons form platonic friendships, where sex is off the menu.
Having a caring friend around seems to greatly benefit the females and their infants, as both are harassed less by other baboons when in the company of their male pal.
But why the males choose to be platonic friends remains a mystery.
The finding published in Behavioral Sociobiology and Ecology also suggests that male baboons may be able to innately recognise their offspring.
Primatologist Nga Nguyen decided to investigate the occurrence of ‘platonic’ friendships in four groups of yellow baboons living in Amboseli, Kenya.
To do so, Nguyen, an assistant professor at California State University Fullerton, California, teamed up with colleagues Russell Van Horn of the Zoological Society of San Diego, California, and Susan Alberts of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and Jeanne Altmann of Princeton University, New Jersey.
Male and females of a few species of monkey, including baboons, macaques and others are known to form so-called ‘friendships’, where particular males and females will spend a lot of time in each other’s company.
These friendships are often strictly platonic, and don’t seem to involve sex. But no-one knows why they occur.
BBC for more