Social Conflicts And Third-party Interventions Of Golden Snub-nosed Monkeys(Rhinopithecus Roxellana) In Shennongjia National Park,China

In order to better protect resources,cooperate in raising young and jointly resist predators,many animals have evolved group-living behavior.However,the conflict cost caused by resource competition in community life is hard to avoid.In order to survive and reproduce for a long time,animals must evolve conflict resolution strategies and management mechanisms to reduce the cost of conflict caused by group-living,so as to maintain community stability and adapt to the severe ecological environment.Conflict management is an important topic in the field of animal behavior and primate evolution because mitigating the negative effects of conflict is an important condition for individuals to coexist and cooperate in social groups.Third-party behavior is a key way to resolve social conflicts?The study of third party conflict management behavior is helpful to understand the origin of prosocial behavior.From July 2018 to November 2019,this project studied the internal conflict and third-party behavior within OMU(One-male unit)in free-range group of Rhinopithecus roxellana in Shennongjia National Park in order to explore the conflict resolution strategy and management in snub-nosed monkey.It focuses on two types of third-party behaviors that may be used as intra-group conflict resolution or management strategies,namely,third-party intervention behaviors and post-conflict third-party affiliation behaviors.The detailed data of 582 conflicts in OMU were collected by behavior sampling and all-occurrances recording.An analysis of the conflict situation shows that conflicts caused by food competition are the most common in Rhinopithecus roxellana within OMU.Individuals use level 1 intensity of aggression most often,and rarely initiate a high-intensity attack that causes injury.Within OMU,third party individuals intervened in 31.9%of conflicts,but the motivation for the occurrence of such behavior and its impact on the outcome of conflicts showed significant gender differences.The friendly intervention of the host male effectively increases the reconciliation behavior,while the aggressive intervention also increases the occurrence of the post-conflict third-party affiliation behavior immediately after the conflict.In contrast,adult females rarely initiate friendly interventions,and aggressive interventions significantly reduce reconciliation and post-conflict third-party affiliation.This may because adult females are not intervening to resolve the conflict.Data show that aggnostic support kin individuals is one of the important motivations for adult females to intervene in conflicts.After a conflict,the leader male is more active than the female in initiating post-conflict third-party affiliation to conflict participants,which may be an important strategy for conflict resolution.This study systematically studied the differences between male and female behaviors in conflict management of social conflict behaviors Rhinopithecus roxellana within OMU,revealing that the leader male plays an important role in conflict resolution,which is of great significance for understanding the stability mechanism of complex primate societies.