Monkeys 'Pay' For Sex

[Lee]

SINGAPORE - Male macaque monkeys pay for sex by grooming females, according to a recent study that suggests the primates may treat sex as a commodity. "In primate societies, grooming is the underlying fabric of it all," Dr. Michael Gumert, a primatologist at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said in a telephone interview Saturday.

"It's a sign of friendship and family, and it's also something that can be exchanged for sexual services," Gumert said.

Gumert's findings, reported in New Scientist last week, resulted from a 20-month observation of about 50 long-tailed macaques in a reserve in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Gumert found after a male grooms a female, the likelihood that she will engage in sexual activity with the male was about three times more than if the grooming had not occurred.

And as with other commodities, the value of sex is affected by supply and demand factors: A male would spend more time grooming a female if there were fewer females in the vicinity.

"And when the female supply is higher, the male spends less time on grooming ... The mating actually becomes cheaper depending on the market," Gumert said.

Other experts not involved in the study welcomed Gumert's research, saying it was a major effort in systematically studying the interaction of organisms in ways in which an exchange of commodities or services can be observed - a theory known as biological markets.

Dr. Peter Hammerstein, a professor at the Institute for Theoretical Biology at Humboldt University in Berlin and Dr. Ronald Noe, a primatologist at the University of Louis-Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, first proposed the concept of biological markets in 1994.

"It is not a rare phenomenon in nature that males have to make some 'mating effort' in order to get a female's 'permission' to mate," Hammerstein said in an interview, likening the effort to a "fee" that the male pays.

"The interesting result of Dr. Gumert's research on macaque mating is that the mating market seems to have an influence on the amount of this fee," Hammerstein said.

Hammserstein said Gumert's findings indicate the monkeys are capable of adjusting their behavior to "different market conditions."

Gumert completed his fieldwork in February 2005 and first published his findings in the November issue of "Animal Behaviour," a scientific monthly journal.

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/t...01071773150535

Interesting stuff, seems like monkeys have a lot of similar traits when it comes to sex as humans do.

Regards,

Lee

[basschick]

they did another study years ago that showed that in groups of monkeys where all the monkeys were well-fed, if they gave the male monkeys all the treats, the females would trade sex for treats.

i wonder what other things monkeys have in common with humans...

[Bec]

i wonder what other things monkeys have in common with humans...

99% of the same DNA :egg:

[Jasun]

That sounds less like "paying" and more like "sucking up."

[MiamiB]

And some people STILL don't believe that we share a common ancestor in our evolutionary past!

Lee

[Kushiel]

That sounds less like "paying" and more like "sucking up."

You mean like when men are stuck on the couch, so they clean and vacuum and take out the trash to return to good favor?

-amazing-

they did another study years ago that showed that in groups of monkeys where all the monkeys were well-fed, if they gave the male monkeys all the treats, the females would trade sex for treats.

i wonder what other things monkeys have in common with humans...

Diamonds, of course. If a man-monkey gives a woman monkey a diamond...
She's pretty much obligated to go down, right?... at least... that's what the commercial says.

[IdolKnights]

Bonobo monkeys are a lot cooler though.

Sexual intercourse plays a major role in Bonobo society, being used as a greeting, a means of conflict resolution and post-conflict reconciliation, and as favors traded by the females in exchange for food. Bonobos are the only non-human apes to have been observed engaging in all of the following sexual activities: face-to-face genital sex (most frequently female-female, then male-female and male-male), tongue kissing, and oral sex.[15] In scientific literature, the female-female sex is often referred to as GG rubbing or genital-genital rubbing, while male-male sex is sometimes referred to as penis fencing.

[skaterkid9]

What if they just throw their poo at you? Does that mean they hate me or are they just into scat?