GROOMING DOWN THE HIERARCHY - ALLOGROOMING IN CAPTIVE BROWN CAPUCHIN MONKEYS, CEBUS-APELLA

Observations of captive female brown capuchin monkeys in five groups r evealed that grooming is primarily the occupation of dominant females at both the individual and dyadic levels. When categorized according t o rank class, alpha females were the only class to perform significant ly more grooming than they received. These results are inconsistent wi th reports on vervets. baboons and macaques, and suggest that grooming in capuchin monkeys may have different functions from those reported for cercopithecine primates. A dyadic analysis revealed, however, that grooming occurred more often between closely ranked females, similar to what is seen in several Old World monkey species. Therefore, some a spects of grooming in capuchins are similar to that seen in Old World monkeys, but the way they distribute grooming is different, which may prompt a re-evaluation of current theories regarding the social functi on of allogrooming in non-human primates. (C) 1997 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.