Mountain gorilla tug-of-war: silverbacks have limited control over reproduction in multimale groups.
To determine who fathers the offspring in wild mountain gorilla groups containing more than one adult male silverback, we genotyped nearly one-fourth (n = 92) of the mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) living in the Virunga Volcanoes region of Africa. Paternity analysis of 48 offspring born into four groups between 1985 and 1999 revealed that, although all infants were sired by within-group males, the socially dominant silverback did not always monopolize reproduction within his group. Instead, the second-ranking male sired an average of 15% of group offspring. This result, in combination with previous findings that second-ranking males fare best by not leaving the group but by staying and waiting to assume dominance even if no reproduction is possible while waiting, is not consistent with expectations from a reproductive skew model in which the silverback concedes controllable reproduction to the second-ranking male. Instead, the data suggest a "tug-of-war" scenario in which neither the dominant nor the second-ranking male has full control over his relative reproductive share. The two top-ranked males were typically unrelated and this, in combination with the mixed paternity of group offspring, means that multimale gorilla groups do not approximate family groups. Instead, as long-term assemblages of related and unrelated individuals, gorilla groups are similar to chimpanzee groups and so offer interesting possibilities for kin-biased interactions among individuals.
Bradley
Brenda J
BJ
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Robbins
Martha M
MM
Williamson
Elizabeth A
EA
Steklis
H Dieter
HD
Steklis
Netzin Gerald
NG
Eckhardt
Nadin
N
Boesch
Christophe
C
Vigilant
Linda
L
D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D005260:Female; D005838:Genotype; D006071:Gorilla gorilla; D006608:Hierarchy, Social; D008297:Male; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats; D008954:Models, Biological; D010334:Paternity; D011157:Population Dynamics; D012098:Reproduction; D012726:Sexual Behavior, Animal; D012930:Social Dominance; D013045:Species Specificity; D013997:Time Factors