Baby Fights!

Ring-tailed lemurs have a very strict dominance hierarchy that regulates most aspects of their lives. Before working with lemurs I was used to primate species where dominance either wasn't all that important or wasn't reinforced on a minute-by-minute basis, like in the ring-taileds. For the RTL's, your place in the pecking order determines when and what kind of food you get to eat, who you can be next to, how often you're groomed, and who will help your baby out when it gets into a pinch. A RTL won't ususally give up the chance to exert her dominance, whether it's by giving a nasty look, making someone get up from their comfy spot, or by smacking them around. Female RTL's like to make sure everyone knows their place. And that they stay there.

Baby lemurs have their own separate hierarchy. In macaques and baboons a kid's dominance status is directly linked to their mom's and their mom's family rank. Not so in RTL's. In the ring-tailed life, it's every baby for herself. You have to fight your way first into your own baby rank and then eventually into the adult ranking system.

This means baby fights. Awesome, adorable, terrible baby fights.


Here's a typical baby fight. Baby A comes up to Baby B. They start playing and wrestling a bit. All of a sudden the wrestling play turns into a fight with the two babies grappling on to one another, growling and screaming and kicking and biting. This little furry ball of baby fury rolls around in the branch for a few seconds until it falls to the ground and both babies get up looking a little dazed and then run off to some adult to groom them reassuringly.

Babies are vicious in sorting out their ranks. Watching the babies figure out their dominance hierarchy was one of the most hilarious times of observation that we had. One of the babies in Orange, i316, earned himself the nickname Bruiser becuase of his sheer tenacity. This baby wanted to be top lemur and wanted everyone else to know it. He had (unfortunately this little guy died at 21 weeks old) a first-time mom (3 years old) of a middle rank who had eyes for the top. Being the kid of a first time mom, Bruiser was smaller than most of the other babies, which made his bullying them around even better.

Bruiser started fights whenever he could, but there was one little lady that finally started giving back to him as good as he gave out. The fights between him and i368 were amazing. They'd wrestle and growl and bite and then break up and then run back at each other and do it all over again. On one occasion Bruiser's mom (316) was so concerned over the fight that she actually stood by, sniffed, and put her hand out at the two warring babies while they duked it out (this was completely out of character for this mom).

Baby smackdown only lasted a couple of weeks, but it was a great couple of weeks while it lasted. Scoring behavior during this time was a challenge -- as much as for what the lemurs were doing as for trying to record data while laughing.