It's rare that an animal garners comparisons to Stalin and Mussolini, but dominant male baboons practice a form of leadership not so different from dictators.

Troupe members follow their leader to a food site even though some get denied a meal, a new study of wild baboons finds.

On a scientific level, the study exposes a flaw in some theoretical models of group behaviour, which conclude that, given equal information, social animals make democratic decisions.

More practically, the research might hold some relevance to modern politics. Baboons showed the blindest devotion to leaders with whom they formed a social bond, a baboon they could believe in.
baboon society
© Tim Davies / ZSL Tsaobis Baboon ProjectIn baboon society, individuals reinforce 'friendships' through grooming one another.

"We've still got this evident bias for why we choose certain leaders," says Andrew King, a behavioural ecologist at the Zoological Society of London who led the study. "It might help us understand why we have certain biological biases to picking certain leaders."

Troupe tracking

He and his colleagues followed two troupes of wild chacma baboons around a wildlife preserve in Namibia.

The troupes - one with 60 members, the other with 32 - were each dominated by aggressive males, who decided each day where the troupe would forage for food.

To test the obedience of troupe members, King's team created artificial foraging sites, which were basically cleared plots of dirt, of varying size, littered with dry kernels of maize. The size of the plot determined how many animals could feed, allowing the researchers to gauge the social dynamics.

Dominant males almost always arrived and fed first, followed down the line by baboons according to their social rank.

"Most of them literally sit around the edge of this patch, waiting to see if they can get a chance," King says. "Some individuals are trying to get into the food patch and the dominant male may chase them off."

Follow the leader

The most obedient baboons seemed to be those that were closest to the dominant male, not by blood, but by social exchanges, King's team found. These subservient baboons tended to exchange grooms with the dominant male more often than rebellious animals.

King thinks that despotism provides other benefits to baboons, even if they don't get first dibs on food. Baboons occasionally split off from their leader, but this was rare. "The group still might not be big enough to counteract that potential threat of being eaten by a leopard," he says.

Other scientists who model how groups of animals interact should pay closer attention to social bonds, says Iain Couzin, a Princeton University, New Jersey biologist who models collective animal behaviour.

"There may be other examples [of despotism], especially within primates, where you have these more complex social hierarchies," he says.

Ants, red deer and macaques all show signs of democratic societies, so researchers might have to look a little hard for such animal despots.

Journal reference: Current Biology (DOI: link)