Alpha male geladas who allowed subordinate competitors into their group had a longer tenure as leader, resulting in an average of three more offspring each during their lifetimes.
The findings, collected from data during a five-year period ending in January 2011 through the University of Michigan Gelada Research Project, were published in the Proceedings of The Royal Society.
The research was conducted by Noah Snyder-Mackler, then a graduate student in the Department of Psychology in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences. He collaborated with Thore Bergman, assistant professor of psychology at Michigan, and Susan Alberts, professor of biology at Duke.
Cooperation is surprisingly common among wild animals, the researchers said. While it makes evolutionary sense for animals to help their kin, it is harder to explain cases where competitors -- especially unrelated adult males -- join forces. This conundrum is particularly hard to explain because mating is generally a zero-sum game in which males can only reproduce by stealing mating opportunities from each other.
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