Socioecological factors and partner preferences in the play behaviour of wild vervet monkeys, Chlorocebus pygerythrus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In primates, it is proposed that social play assists in maintaining social relationships as well as developing motor and cognitive skills. The structure and functions of social play vary greatly by species, but such variation does not strongly follow a phylogenetic pattern, suggesting that socioecological factors must also be examined. Using 3 years of data collected across three troops of wild vervet monkeys in South Africa, we explored play partner preferences and examined their relationship with relevant socioecological factors and vervet natural history to test the motor-training hypothesis and social skills hypotheses. Following the motor-training hypothesis, we hypothesized that we would find similar play frequencies across sexes, given that this species is characterized by high levels of aggression in both males and females. We did not find support for this hypothesis, as male–male dyads played at a higher frequency than female–female and mixed-sex dyads. As predicted by social skills hypotheses, individuals were more likely to play with others of similar dominance rank and with kin over nonkin, indicating that social play may serve social functions, such as testing or establishing dominance relationships, navigating rank trajectory and affiliation maintenance among kin. However, contrary to social skills hypotheses, our study did not consistently support all proposed affiliative aspects, as we found no evidence that vervets play preferentially with grooming partners or individuals of close proximity. Overall, our study contributes insights into the functions and patterns of social play in this specific primate species and underscores the broader importance of considering social and ecological factors in understanding the complexities of social play behaviour. We address critical gaps in our knowledge and provide potential directions for future research that would contribute to a more holistic understanding of primate social dynamics. • We explored factors influencing play partner preferences in wild vervet monkeys. • Vervet monkeys preferred social play partners based on sex, rank and kinship. • Play may function to test relationships, navigate rank and maintain affiliation. • Sex differences in play may result from socioecological factors and adult roles.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".