“There is no one else in the area of animal behavior who does such incredibly interesting experiments in the field,” said Marc Hauser, a biologist at Harvard who was their first student.ĭr. Sapolsky, a Stanford biologist and an author who has studied baboons in the wild for many years. “Any work of Dorothy and Robert’s is going to be as good as you get in the field,” said Robert M.
The two others look to the mother, evidence that vervets know whose baby is whose.Īn experiment like this - recording the sounds, waiting until the animals are in the right place and performing numerous controls - can take months to complete, but the results are widely admired by other biologists. When a baby vervet’s call is played to three females, for instance, the mother looks to the source of the sound. But all that he will find is the loudspeaker from which researchers have played Jackalberry’s recorded call. The video shows him loping off in the direction of Jackalberry’s whoop. But that means Cassius has left her unguarded. Hmm, Jackalberry must be hooking up with some one else. “Jackalberry here, but Cassius over there. You can almost see the wheels turn slowly in his head: His puzzlement is plain on the video made of his reaction. No hope of sex today.īut then, surprisingly, he hears Cassius’s signature greeting grunt to his left. He recognizes the voice as that of Jackalberry, the current consort of Cassius, a male who outranks Royal in the strict hierarchy of male baboons. A perplexing event is about to disturb his day.įrom the bushes to his right, he hears a staccato whoop, the distinctive call that female baboons always make after mating. Royal is a cantankerous old male baboon whose troop of some 80 members lives in the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana.
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