Male baboons, under certain situations, will turn to a gruesome practice to increase their chances of creating offspring: They'll attack pregnant females to kill infants in utero.
Academics from Duke University, in a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, recorded that behavior as well as infanticide in a group of baboons in Kenya's Amboseli basin and described why such attacks happen and under what conditions.
Desperate Times Lead To Desperate Measures
Infanticide - killing infants of their own kind - is seen in numerous animal species, including baboons: Lions also do it, and so dolphins too. Feticide - killing an unborn infant by attacking its prenatal mother - is less well studied, say the researchers, who took a closer look at baboon life to quantify how often both killings happen and the environments present when they do.
However, in times where fertile females were in short, the death rates were more than three times as high. "In states where males have few occasions, they resort to violence to achieve what's essential to survive and reproduce," lead author Matthew Zipple long-established in Duke Today. "When procreative opportunities abound, this behavior is less frequent."
Killing Fetuses Reduces A Male's Waiting Time Too, Researchers Said
It starts with new members of a public. Baboon troops usually have a couple of males that simply show up and join - called "immigrants" in the research - after having left their initial inhabitants in a quest for mates.
The prevailing theory, say the scientists, is that infanticide and feticide both speed the obtainability for otherwise pregnant or lactating females to breed again. But it could take up to a year before a child-bearing baboon could mate again, with the acts of domestic ferocity on the born and unborn the females could be ready to mate again in scarcely more than a month.
Most of the time, the team found, the males did in fact end up reproducing with the females whose unborn or infants they killed.
Feticide and infanticide rates were at its peak, the scientists found, with immigrant males that had rose quickly on top of the social ranks, which merges with something study co-author Susan Alberts told Duke Today. Baboon males at the top of the social ladder should make tracks: They usually get bounced from importance within a year of their ascendancy. Passing on their name, as it were, becomes a top importance.
