Macaques at Japan reserve get first alpha female in 70-year history

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/03/macaques-at-japan-reserve-get-first-alpha-female-in-70-year-history

by NotSwift • 5 years ago

142 97 5 years ago

rory2• 5 years ago

This is all the more impressive because macaques generally display strong sexual dimorphism in size (males are ~45% bigger on average than females, vs. more like ~15% in humans). I wonder how big Yakei is.

elliekelly• 5 years ago

I think the article said she’s 10kg but it didn’t say the size of the former alpha male. I wish they had mentioned the size difference for comparison, that’s interesting!

gambiting• 5 years ago

Well it does say that she roughed up the previous alpha male, so presumably she's at least similar in size/strength.

rory2• 5 years ago

Oh wow I missed that, thanks for catching. Given these are Japanese macaques, it looks like typical m/f size difference is more like ~32%, not ~45%, and 10kg puts her larger than the average female, but smaller than the average male. Would be interested in the former alpha males size too, but it's probably safe to assume he was bigger!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_macaque

prvc2• 5 years ago

Well, the law of large numbers makes it understandable.

clairity• 5 years ago

it’s strength, both psychological and physical, that correlates most closely with dominance, not size or gender/sex, though those of course tend to correlate with physical strength. a nice property of sexual reproduction (as opposed to asexual) is that you get two chances at having generalized strength in parents, as opposed to one, which correlates with greater family fitness and offspring survival.

this is probably the biggest misconception in mainstream discussions of gender/sex and power (and part of what makes them so tiresome), which threads through everything from affirmative action to sexual harassment to lgbt rights. multidimensional strength fosters dominance, not just gender/sex or simply size. the dominant (or submissive) gender can be performed by either sex. this is foundational for understanding power dynamics (whether sexual, political, economic, social, religious, or anything else).

yann2• 5 years ago

Ok go read about Gandhi now.

graderjs14• 5 years ago

This is awesome. To get the top job, she: beat up her own mother; then took on the existing alpha 4x her age, and probably larger; then in the next 'peanut session' he had to backdown and let her eat first; and now she walks with an erect tail and goes and shakes trees for fun--It expresses her power. How cool is that!

It just goes to show, it's never about gender, just about choices, ambition and how brave you choose to be. Fuck yeah!

I wonder if the social dynamics will change under a (nominally?) female leader?

lm28469• 5 years ago

beat up her own mother
just about choices and how brave you choose to be

Reminds me of Hollywood directors who think "alpha" women characters have to be regular women with all the traits of "toxic masculinity"

graderjs14• 5 years ago

Totally! Agree that feminists and modern women aspiring to adopt male traits rather than embracing innate female goddess energy and power is stupid, especially when they, at the same time, "stand against" how "toxic" men are.

But then again, some of those traits you pretend are toxic, are actually just awesome, and work in the human world. So why should "man" or "woman" polarity have dibs on that stuff? That gendering of traits is the fucking stupid thing I think. Anyone can choose to do anything. Don't trust people who devalue choice, they're the ones that love to try to deflect blame and responsibility onto anyone but themselves.

But yeah, the human world is pretty fucked up as a whole, male and female, because we're all full of ape brain shit, of which you're no better being human, too.

runawaybottle2• 5 years ago

Bill Burr always had a good joke about inclusivity in politics, where the gist of it is - just because you have a woman, or a minority as your leader, doesn’t also mean that a woman or minority won’t be a corrupt piece of shit.

You’ll just have diversity in corruption, nothing will truly change, so don’t just blindly support these current ideologies.

DonHopkins• 5 years ago

That's why I love Chrisjen Avasarala, in The Expanse! But does her potty mouth count as "toxic masculinity"?

https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Chrisjen_Avasarala_(TV)

A master politician and maneuverer, she achieved one of the highest ranks in UN government without ever standing for election. She manipulates those in the highest seats of power through careful cultivation of relationships with their spouses, friends, and staff nearest to them. [...]
Avasarala's personality is often one of clashing traits. She is erudite and elegant, always properly and beautifully dressed, but is also notorious for her use of foul language and profanity, and was described by Bobbie as cursing "like a trucker". She has been shown to be cold and ruthless one moment, as she tortures a prisoner for information or manipulates her close friend DeGraaf into ruining his career for her political gain, while she is warm and maternal the next, playing with her grandson or giving Errinwright a chance to redeem himself. She is shrewd and intelligent, knows her way around people, and is also an astute and remorseless deceiver, often lying to advance her goals, such as when she pretended to know Captain Yvgeny to convince Sorrento-Gillis to do what she wanted, or attributed fake quotes to the deceased Admiral Souther and called him her friend, while in truth they barely spoke to each other.

Blikkentrekker4• 5 years ago

What example are you thinking of?

serverholic3• 5 years ago

We just going to ignore that this was the first one in 70 years?

It just goes to show, it's never about gender, just about choices, ambition and how brave you choose to be.

Then why is this newsworthy?

graderjs14• 5 years ago

Because, I suppose, people seem to have forgotten that.

billytetrud• 5 years ago

It's interesting, but brutal. I wouldn't call this "awesome". Beating up your mother isn't "brave". This is literally a monkey dictatorship. That alpha is probably really shitty to be around.

Fern_Blossom2• 5 years ago

Quick search, macaques's lifespans are roughly 20-30 years. The old alpha was 31... so, in human terms (roughly), it's like a 20-ish year old woman beats a man in his 60s-70s... and she's "brave".

graderjs14• 5 years ago

you're judging everything from a human point of view but that's not what I'm doing here. It's awesome because she achieved what she wanted to achieve using whatever means necessary and so your moral fear about this comes from the idea that it's somehow wrong to beat up your own mother. Sure in our society it would be--what you're really going to take it as like I'm saying yeah that's a good thing? Haha--but in the monkey society that's how things work. And we're not that different to monkeys you know violence kind of rules at the end of the day when you look at military technology and so on. but the other side of it maybe the mother was really abusive mother or just was a really terrible monkey person. but I'm not assuming that I'm just assuming that this girl did what she needed to do to get to the top in that monkey society and that is what is awesome truly fucking awesome. I didn't care about your human morals applied to this monkey situation. Get out of here! :)

prvc2• 5 years ago

Undoubtedly, the writers at the Guardian were thinking the same. However, one would do well to doubt whether the above described behaviors would be good were they to be performed by humans.

taeric2• 5 years ago

I'm struggling to see how physically fighting to get dominance can possibly be portrayed as a good thing. :(

Noteworthy and circumstances make it a good story. But... It seems to fly in the face of modern sensibilities.

turing_complete• 5 years ago

I am really not sure if this comment is ironic or not. It reads like it has to be, but today you never know.

doitLP• 5 years ago

It is not. Look at poster’s other comments.

taeric2• 5 years ago

With most of the responses, I am also not clear on this.

IanClarke7• 5 years ago

I read it as ironic.

If it is not then: Wow.

Ridiculous statement: "It just goes to show, it's never about gender, just about choices, ambition and how brave you choose to be."

Followed by: "Fuck yeah!"

--> Ironic in my world, but "the other side ("feminists") seem to have adapted to also address / talk to (deceive/decept) 'more conservative' people with their speech. We try to include/reach each other.

graderjs14• 5 years ago

Well see you guys need to be nuanced and maybe you're not capable of seeing the nuance in the current binary love hate zero nuance Zeitgeist discourse. there's irony in there but my beliefs are clearly very different to yours so the irony is different to your irony. But my sentiment is totally true it is all about choices about being brave and having ambition that's how you can get what you want rather than playing the fake victim demanding others give to you and always being disempowered and pretending that somehow to empowerment.

yomly• 5 years ago

I mean we had the Amazonians, Boudica, Cleopatra, Jean D'Arc, Mulan, Wu Zetian...

It's not like if you have a large enough sample size you won't discover alpha females in even the human world when it was dominated by physical violence prior to the invention of the gun.

thaumasiotes3• 5 years ago

then took on the existing alpha 4x her age, and probably larger;

Beating up someone four times your own age is only challenging if you're a child.

graderjs14• 5 years ago

everyone became obsessed about the beating up thing the brave thing that I saw was never that that was just something she needed to do on the path to get there-- that was awesome because she showed how she's willing to do that to go against the hierarchy of her society. I don't care she beat up her own mother I'm not a monkey and I'm not reading it from a human point of view I'm reading it from a monkey point of view and so that's totally fine that she did that. What I'm saying is brave is that she took on how no women of the office how it's so rare and she became the alpha. what I find you funny is like the uniformity of the responses of people here...in response to this admittedly challenging idea I proposed. But the people are not dealing with the challenging idea on its face in fact they're deliberately misinterpreting it to find something which maybe more or less challenging for them but where they can cultivate I believe more outrage. even though you don't have to interpret it in this way people interpret the comment in the way where they can find the most outrageous thing and respond to it as if that's the truth. But it's not the truth it's only their interpretation which they're pretending to be the truth... almost so they can have something to be outraged about. it's quite a ridiculous interpretation but it makes sense from an ape brain point of view like you know you you see a situation where you want to see an exaggerate the conflict so you can rile yourself up and get ready for conflict. I think the greatest irony here is that in this comment thread everyone's saying oh you know humans are so much better than this and how could this guy say these comments--right?--they're actually all behaving in an ape brain way with his deliberate misinterpretation egging themselves on towards conflict. Haha, it's hilarious!

AutumnCurtain• 5 years ago

Interesting that she's "walking the walk" in terms of dominance behaviors too. It would be fascinating to study whether she underwent significant hormonal changes after taking leadership or whether she had a different hormonal makeup compared to the average female "follower" even prior to her takeover.

tjpnz• 5 years ago

I've been there a few times but always referred to it as "Monkey Mountain", never knew it was called Takasakiyama. If you're in Beppu it's well worth a visit.

https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e4703.html

Bear in mind that these are wild animals and that there are days where the park's closed due to no monkeys.

thaumasiotes3• 5 years ago

Well, you had to figure it was named something in Japanese, right?

高崎山 appears to mean "tall, mountainous mountain". Monkeys aren't mentioned, though the name of the monkey preserve, 高崎山自然動物園 "Mount Takasaki Nature Zoo", does mention animals.

greyfox• 5 years ago

i wonder what implications this has on mating? will she find a mate? Presumably the male would need to dominate her in order to procreate, that does not appear to be the case, currently.

Will she attempt to assume the male role in the mating process?

Lots of questions here around this issue.

TheAdamAndChe• 5 years ago

It would also be interesting to see if the mating strategies and behaviors of the males change too.

Let's hope they are thoroughly monitored and studied.

KONAir• 5 years ago

Bench pressing macaques on instagram soon.

IanClarke7• 5 years ago

Let's be honest and address the implicitly given analogy to our modern human world. What are the different motivations males and females have in general and why did she end up in this alpha-position, while still lacking a lot of the advantages a male would have (mating and procreating with a lot of females)? It's because "the other gender" also carries all these (particularly very desirable in one gender) traits in them. I always think of men, which have very attractive daughters, like Billy Ray Cyrus (Miley Cyrus) or Rob Schneider (Elle King), but they themselves can't profit that much from the interesting looks (nose) and rather even look like a bum, themselves.

So "the other sex" also inevitably carries around all these (attractive) traits (kind of "reciprocally"), typically: They are there, but don't matter, really. They were inherited and can be passed on, though.

And in this very rare case like this: A female became an alpha. Her masculinity traits, which should rather only exist reciprocally within her (as a female), were coming out so strong, that she beat all the males. Though: No mass-mating (offspring) for her, rather likely: No offspring at all.

lkrubner5• 5 years ago

We should expect to see this throughout the world, as the climate crisis intensifies. We should expect to see this especially in intelligent or social species. Game theory predicts that, from the point of view of parents, when the population is expanding it is better to have sons and when the population is shrinking it is better to have daughters. A son might have a lot of children when times are good and zero children when times are bad. A daughter is likely to always have some children, and therefore is a safer bet when things are bad. This shifts the incentives for parents. When population is falling, parents have an incentive to care less about their sons, and to invest more resources in their daughters.

That much is known.

We can also speculate that if daughters are now receiving more investment as children, they are better positioned to go higher in society as they become adults. A general shift in political power, throughout social species, should be expected, as the climate crisis threatens more and more species with extinction.

This might extent to even those species in zoos, as their population usually is not allowed to expand.

astrojams• 5 years ago

Wow this is fascinating. I'd love to read more about this, do you have any links to articles discussing this behavior?

lkrubner5• 5 years ago

Here is a start, follow the sources from here:

https://www.livescience.com/19311-famine-male-births-sex-rat...

whatshisface• 5 years ago

That makes no sense to me because for every child a daughter has, someone's son had a child. It has to balance out unless someone invents monkey mitosis.

sizzle• 5 years ago

In nature, males can impregnate many females and do not have to necessarily be around to rear their many offspring. So it is advantageous to have many females that can procreate with less males to increase the population size at a higher rate than more males and less females to mate with.

IanClarke7• 5 years ago

A few man have a lot of offspring, which is how it makes sense again.

sandworm101• 5 years ago

> It has to balance out

It doesn't. In a species with 50/50 split between male and female, the number of males is almost irrelevant to population growth. Take rabbits. If you kill at birth 90% of the males, the population growth won't slow as the limit is the number of babies per-female. The 10% of males that survive simply father more kids via more females. Males can do that. Females cannot. Going one step further, killing all those males increases the resources available to the females. Ironically, culling those males can cause a population to grow faster than if they lived.

rainbowzootsuit• 5 years ago

Indications from genetic research are that humans may have about twice as many female ancestors as male according to some theory about discrepancy in the "time to most recent common ancestor" for mitochondrial DNA (extrapolating for female ancestors) and the nonrecombining portion of the Y chromosome (extrapolating for male ancestors).

I think the presence discrepancy is reasonably well accepted.

https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/21/11/2047/1147770

IanClarke7• 5 years ago

The guys weren't cutting it any more. They were not delivering on the expectations of the group (growing it). Life became too harsh and stressful for them, they are not even mating any more, since the offspring couldn't be fed, so they stop breading with the females. Still: Everyone is disappointed and the males know it, too... affecting their behavior which gets less dominant/aggressive. The females are now in focus, since they procreated more reliably (on average, the old alpha, that had a lot of offspring, is likely dead by now). The shift to a female leader means the population is in trouble and in decline. A crisis manager(female) gets installed.

Note that typically older males mate with (much) younger females: It's no coincidence, that she is that much younger than her male counter parts: She is angry about her mating partners that they have stopped mating (with her). Older females have offspring. The old alpha male, which is dead, has a lot of offspring. The external life conditions just became too harsh, this is not a happy setup. There are 2 strategies, but one is to react on external circumstances (stop procreating), instead of blindly going ahead and having to stem the bill later (starving babies). Apes are intelligent enough for the first, but there are furious women now (including "her").

Blikkentrekker4• 5 years ago

This like most evolutionary psychology seems like one of those “anything goes” explanations that simply seems like a plausible explanation, but can just as easily be offered to explain falsehoods.

The problem with it is that one can invent a scenario that never happened and asked for an explanation and similar such plausible explanations can be proffered for it, but there's really no way to actually verify and test them.

It can just as easily be explained with “It is a simple fluke that will repeat itself in another 70 years.”.

lkrubner5• 5 years ago

Here is a start, follow the sources from here:

https://www.livescience.com/19311-famine-male-births-sex-rat...

make3• 5 years ago

do you have sources for this, it's really not obvious for me, sounds a bit like a very confidently said hot take a little bit (without a source)

lkrubner5• 5 years ago

Here is a start, follow the sources from here:

https://www.livescience.com/19311-famine-male-births-sex-rat...

prestigious• 5 years ago

That's funny, I keep hearing from largely feminists that "alpha's don't exist in nature, it's a myth"

fao_• 5 years ago

"""In 1970, the book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species was published, written by David Mech. It was a success. The book helped to popularize the alpha concept, because many people referred to Mech's work.

Mech has written on his website that he repeatedly asked the publisher to stop printing the book because much of the information is outdated — including the concept behind the alpha wolf. Nevertheless, the book is still being sold."""

https://phys.org/news/2021-04-wolf-dont-alpha-males-females....

Slow_Hand2• 5 years ago

Hasn’t the concept of alphas been discredited/debunked by the originator of the concept? Or is that strictly for wolves?

Tiktaalik• 5 years ago

Maybe "alpha" wolves have been debunked, but there are lots of research that points to matriarchal animal clan organization in other species.

Resident Orcas would be a notable example.

IanClarke7• 5 years ago

The originator of the (generic) concept "alpha" (please let us know who this is / who you think this is) has discontinued the term "alpha" (quite an alpha-decision from him, I would say) due to new insights discovered when observing wolves. Alpha does not exist for wolves (presumably)... and in general. To extend just further (why not) the concept gets fully discontinued, due to public pressure, because everything is equal anyway.

Slow_Hand2• 5 years ago

You had me until your last sentence. What do you mean that the term is being discontinued due to public pressure? Isn't it natural for concepts to go away if they're found to be inaccurate (ex: phlogiston)? I also don't understand "everything is equal anyway". Could you elaborate?

Since you mention the term in relationship to the public, I actually think that "alpha" as a term to describe someone who is dominant has been doing just fine as a societal meme, despite it being used less among biologists/whomever. In this sense it doesn't seem to be going away at all.

IntrepidWorm• 5 years ago

The concept of alpha, beta, etc in wolves was observed in captivity, and then incorrectly extrapolated to describe wild populations. Now science is finding that if you put a social species in a captive environment with unfamiliar stressors and dissolve the existing natural social groups that would have existed freely, unnatural social hierarchies develop to fill the gap.

Macaques at Japan reserve get first alpha female in 70-year history

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