For the study, a team of researchers from Finland’s University of Turku observed two troops of wild chacma baboons in central Namibia, Africa, between August and December 2021.<\/p>\n
There were 16 families living in the troops, with a total of 49 young siblings. <\/p>\n
Baboons live in groups ruled by the females, so the scientists spent lots of time watching baboon mothers resting and grooming their young.<\/p>\n
Grooming involves removing bugs and dirt from fur and gently stroking it. <\/p>\n
The scientists paid close attention to when the grooming was interrupted by a jealous sibling – often by biting, slapping, crying or more gently asking for affection.<\/p>\n
What they found was “strikingly mirrors patterns of sibling jealousy reported in humans”.<\/p>\n
The young baboons were more likely to interrupt their mother when she was grooming one of their siblings than when she was just resting.<\/p>\n
The study also found that the older baboons were less likely to interrupt a sibling’s alone time with their mother.<\/p>\n
But it turns out the mother baboons chose to groom some baby baboons more than others.<\/p>\n
Bad news though – while your squabble with a sibling might be scientifically justified, Delaunay says that the displays of sibling jealousy did not appear to offer “many immediate benefits”.<\/p>\n
Baboon mothers only stopped grooming one of their children, after an outburst from another baby, about 20 percent of the time, the scientists found.<\/p>\n
And she only then started grooming the jealous child nine percent of the time. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the study, a team of researchers from Finland’s University of Turku observed two troops of wild chacma…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422183,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-422182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}