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Primate infanticide and its adaptive significance

ZHANG Peng   

  1. Department of Anthropology,Sun Yat-sen University,Guangzhou 510275,China
  • Online:2011-05-27 Published:2011-03-02

非人灵长类的杀婴行为及其适应意义

张鹏   

  1. 中山大学人类学系,广州 510275

Abstract: Infanticide in the wild has been observed in natural populations of non-human primates. The aim of this paper is to review reports in 21 primate species of 69 cases, and to discuss the adaptive significance of this behavior. Most of infanticides are associated with adaptive male reproductive strategy, with following characteristics:(1)males killed infants unlikely to be sired by themselves;(2)the mother can be fertilized earlier than if the infant had lived; and (3)the infanticidal male has an increased probability of copulation with the females whose infants they had killed. Some cases of infanticides may unlikely to be related with male reproductive benefit, and could be explained by other hypotheses such as the by-product of male aggression hypothesis, elimination of future rival hypothesis, cannibalism hypothesis and social pathology hypothesis. Infanticide causes a major loss of reproductive output for the mother. Females developed social-counterstrategies against infanticide by males, including direct counter-aggression toward infanticidal males, keeping away from potential infanticidal males, sexual strategies that manipulate the paternities and paternity assessments of potential infanticidal and protective males, social association with protective males and containing multiple males in groups. These counterstrategies are sufficiently successful to make infanticide rare in most species, but the infanticide risk will not be eliminated, as long as costs of infanticide by males are lower than those of counter-infanticide efforts by females.

Key words: Infanticide, Male reproductive strategy, Nonhuman primate, Social counterstrategies against infanticide

摘要: 杀婴现象普遍存在于非人灵长类种类中,本文通过综述目前已知的21 种非人灵长类的69 例杀婴行为记
录,探讨了非人灵长类杀婴行为的适应性意义。大多数雄性杀婴行为符合雄性繁殖策略假说,既满足以下3 个
条件:(1)杀婴雄性与受害婴仔没有父子关系;(2)失去婴猴的母亲会提前进入发情状态;(3)受害雌性随后
可能与杀婴雄性交配。不过有些个别的杀婴现象与雄性繁殖利益无关,文中进一步介绍了误伤假说、减少未来
竞争者假说、肉食假说和病态行为假说。杀婴无疑会对受害母亲造成巨大的损失。雌性防范杀婴的策略包括直
接抵抗、回避接触雄性、积极发情、依靠保护雄性和改变繁殖群组成等多种方式。但是雄性杀婴现象不会完全
消失,因为出现该行为的根本原因是雌性防范雄性杀婴的难度较大,而雄性实施杀婴行为的风险较低、利益较
高。

关键词: 杀婴, 非人灵长类, 雄性繁殖策略, 杀婴行为的防范对策