Study finds monkeys pay for Sex with grooming - Monkey Business?

POSTED BY QBert on Jan 7 under Science/Tech

January 7, 2008
Study finds monkeys pay for sex with grooming - Monkey business?
Catfish J. Rivers

monkeys grooming

Male macaque monkeys pay for sex with the act of grooming female monkeys, according to a study reported on by the Associated Press. The study suggests that sex is treated as a commodity by primates and that it even has a “market value” depending on the concentration of female primates within the group. The study lasted approximately 20 weeks and observed a group of 50 macaque monkeys.

“In primate societies, grooming is the underlying fabric of it all,” Dr. Michael Gumert, a primatologist at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in the interview conducted by AP. Gumert gos on to describe the act of grooming as a, “a sign of friendship and family, and it’s also something that can be exchanged for sexual services.”

In support of this claim, male monkeys in the study were able to increase their chances of getting lucky, being nearly 3 times as likely to “get some” after grooming a female. The study also found that in groups where females were more plentiful, the males spent a significantly shorter time during grooming sessions.

The findings of this study suggest that there is an actual market value for sex that is understood on some level by the monkeys. 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. Gemert’s findings seem to indeed support this theory, and further suggests that primates are able to adjust to market conditions, perhaps paving the way towards understanding “the economics of monkey business”.