New research shows that while baboon societies maintain a strong and structured hierarchy, the "big guys" don't necessarily make all of the decisions.
A team of researchers used GPS tracking to reveal the complex structure of baboons and other animals living in complex, stratified societies tend to make decisions democratically, the University of California, Davis reported.
"It's not necessarily the biggest alpha males that influence where groups go. Our results illustrate an important distinction between social status and leadership, and show that democratic decision-making takes place even in highly stratified societies," said co-author Meg Crofoot, assistant professor of anthropology at UC Davis. "The question we are really trying to tackle with this research is how social animals living in complex societies make decisions. Now we have data about group decision-making in social systems that are complex in many of the ways human societies are complex."
The study was the first to use GPS tracking among a large group of primates. They fitted 25 baboons with GPS tracking collars for two weeks in late 2012 at the Mpala Research Center in Kenya. These GPS units had the ability to identify the location of each animal within a quarter of a meter at a rate of one location per second, creating 20 million GPS data points.
"We can closely examine how they are responding to one another," Crofoot said. "These technological advances are giving us unprecedented windows into the lives of group-living of animals."
The advanced technology revealed the patterns of baboon movement within the community, and found they were similar to what can be seen in fish, bird, and even insect communities; the general rules within these varied communities can be predicted with a simple set of rules such as "follow your neighbor."
"Decision-making in complex societies may not be all that different than that in animals with more simple societal structures," Crofoot said. "They may all be playing by the same rules."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Science.
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