![]() Some of these commodities include coalitional support, food, tolerance at food sources, mating opportunities, and infant handling. Biological market theory holds that individuals could exchange grooming for in-kind reciprocal benefits or other commodities/services, based on economic laws of supply and demand. When the group size increases, individuals need to devote more investment to social grooming to maintain social relationships with a larger number of individuals or increase grooming towards valuable partners. Grooming behavior can be viewed as a longer-term investment aimed at attaining certain benefits, and its prevalence should fluctuate with group size. Grooming can also have a derived social function it can be used to establish and reinforce social bonds and to maintain group cohesion see also. Grooming can fulfil a hygienic function, providing tangible benefits in the form of ectoparasite and dirt removal. Most primates live in permanent heterosexual social groups within which they use grooming as an affiliative social tool. Besides reducing competition, females may also leave their harems to improve their reproductive prospects, e.g., by seeking a high-quality male. Mechanistically, the main avenue through which this homeostasis is achieved is via dispersal to smaller groups. There will thus be selective pressures to maintain the group size at a healthy level. The other type of female–female competition is competition over breeding opportunities, which can manifest itself in the form of reproductive interference, aggression, the eviction of rivals, and physiological suppression of subordinate females. The intensified resource competition resulting from an increase in group size can impose physiological and social stress on females, thereby depressing fertility. The high energy requirements of female mammals during pregnancy and lactation mean that their reproductive success rate is often limited by access to resources. ![]() Co-resident females experience competition over resources and the sexual attention of males. A male’s reproductive success is limited primarily by the number of females that he can inseminate, so males with larger harems accrue higher reproductive success. The size of a harem reflects the outcome between optimizing individual reproductive strategies and minimizing costs. Variance in male reproductive success is pronounced in a female defense polygyny system with sexual dimorphism and other secondary sexual traits (badges of status and ornaments) affecting male mating success. Polygyny is a common mating system in mammals and birds and comes in two main forms : males either guard high-quality resources to attract females (resource defense polygyny), or they directly control access to a group of females clumped in space (female defense polygyny).
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