2 days ago
Richard Collins: Baboons walk in line to be close to their friends
'Crossing the T' was a naval-warfare strategy. A commander would manoeuver his ships into a line at right angles to, and in front of, his opponent's. By doing so, he could deploy both his fore and aft guns, while his adversary could use only the forward ones. At the Battle of Jutland in May 1916, the British 'crossed' the German fleet twice, but the tactic failed in poor visibility. The British lost 6,093 sailors, the Germans lost 2,551. Eels, feeding on the corpses that autumn, were said to have grown as fat as human limbs.
Sixteen years later, Captain Langsdorf scuttled the Graf Spee, just inside Uruguay's territorial waters, to avoid British cruisers waiting, in crossed T position, beyond the mouth of the River Plate.
For wild creatures, moving in a particular order can be just as important.
Migrating geese and swans travel in V-formation. The leading birds cut through the air, creating eddies which reduce the energy demands of those following.
Elephants often travel in line, one behind the other; hungry big cats may be on the prowl, ready to attack a vulnerable member of the troop. By keeping strong individuals to front and rear, and the weaker ones in between, security is maximised.
Musk-oxen, likewise, 'encircle the wagons' to protect their calves from marauding wolf-packs.
So-called 'stoat funerals' are sometimes reported. These aggressive little carnivores are highly territorial, so the processions, if they really do occur, must be family-based in structure, a mother moving house, for example, with her youngsters trailing her.
Baboons also walk in line, in what researchers call 'progressions'.
But why these endearing African primates do so has been much debated. The 'risk hypothesis' suggests that, somehow, being in a line shields the vulnerable from predators. But how does it do so?
Another suggestion is that dominant individuals are trying to 'seize the day', by installing themselves as leaders within the troop... the 'competition hypothesis'.
Some studies suggested that, when forming processions, baboons follow Lady Macbeth's entreaty 'stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once'. Other researchers, however, maintained that the behaviour can't be random. There must, they suggested, be some underlying structure to a procession. They couldn't, however, suggest what it might be. Now, scientists from Swansea University have come up with a plausible explanation.
The Swansea team fitted GPS tracking devices to members of a chacma baboon troop on South Africa's Cape Peninsula. Seventy-eight processions were recorded. The GPS data revealed an underlying order in what had appeared previously to be chaotic. Neither security nor feeding advantages seemed responsible for it.
The key to the behaviour is family ties: a procession is not sequence of individuals but of groups. "Baboons show repeatability in their social order, which is best explained by patterns of social affiliation rather than adaptive responses to risk, access to resources, or decision making."
As Vladimir says to Estragon in Waiting for Godot 'it's not what you do but the way you do it', that matters. This, it seems, is often the case also in the natural world.
