Female putty-nosed monkeys use males as ‘hired guns’: Study

Females only cease the alarm call when males produce calls associated with anti-predator defence.

Brazzaville: Researchers with the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Congo Program and the Nouabale-Ndoki Foundation found that female putty-nosed monkeys (Cercopithecus nictitans) use males as “hired guns” to defend from predators such as leopards.

Publishing their results in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the team discovered that female monkeys use alarm calls to recruit males to defend them from predators. The researchers conducted the study among 19 different groups of wild putty-nosed monkeys, a type of forest guenon, in Mbeli Bai, a study area within the forests in Nouabale-Ndoki National Park, Northern Republic of Congo.

The results promote the idea that females’ general alarm requires males to assess the nature of the threat and that it serves to recruit males to ensure group defence. Females only cease the alarm call when males produce calls associated with anti-predator defence.

Said the study’s lead author Frederic Gnepa Mehon of WCS’s Congo Program and the Nouabale-Ndoki Foundation: “Our observations on other forest guenons suggest that if males do not prove to be good group protectors, they likely have to leave groups earlier than good defenders. To date, it remains unclear whether female guenons have a saying in mate choice, but our current results strongly suggest this possibility.”