ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2005
Mountain gorilla tug-of-war: silverbacks have limited control over reproduction in multimale groups.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2005. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Paternity loss in contrasting mammalian societies.Biology letters · 2006Pooled it
- Increases in fecal testosterone precede increases in fecal dehydroepiandrosterone in wild male mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei).Journal of comparative physiology. B, Biochemical, systemic, and environmental physiology · 2026Article
- Pervasive relaxed selection on spermatogenesis genes coincident with the evolution of polygyny in gorillas.eLife · 2026Article
- Assessing Variance in Male Reproductive Skew Based on Long-Term Data in Free-Ranging Rhesus Macaques.American journal of primatology · 2025Article
- Vocal consensus building for collective departures in wild western gorillas.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Lethal combats in the forest among wild western gorillas.iScience · 2024Article
- Comparative genomic analyses provide new insights into evolutionary history and conservation genomics of gorillas.BMC ecology and evolution · 2024Review
- Multiple mechanisms for inbreeding avoidance used simultaneously in a wild ape.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Reproductive inequality among males in the genusPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Paternity data reveal high MHC diversity among sires in a polygynandrous, egalitarian primate.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The impact of small groups on pre- and postcopulatory sexual selection in polyandrous populations.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Article
- Behavioural and physiological plasticity in social hierarchies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- No evidence for female kin association, indications for extragroup paternity, and sex-biased dispersal patterns in wild western gorillas.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Article
- Female fertile phase synchrony, and male mating and reproductive skew, in the crested macaque.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Violent encounters between social units hinder the growth of a high-density mountain gorilla population.Science advances · 2020Article
- Comparing measures of social complexity: larger mountain gorilla groups do not have a greater diversity of relationships.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- How can non-human primates inform evolutionary perspectives on female-biased kinship in humans?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Review
- Dispersal and reproductive careers of male mountain gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda.Primates; journal of primatology · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To determine who fathers the offspring in wild mountain gorilla groups containing more than one adult male silverback, we genotyped nearly one-fourth (n = 92) of the mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) living in the Virunga Volcanoes region of Africa. Paternity analysis of 48 offspring born into four groups between 1985 and 1999 revealed that, although all infants were sired by within-group males, the socially dominant silverback did not always monopolize reproduction within his group. Instead, the second-ranking male sired an average of 15% of group offspring. This result, in combination with previous findings that second-ranking males fare best by not leaving the group but by staying and waiting to assume dominance even if no reproduction is possible while waiting, is not consistent with expectations from a reproductive skew model in which the silverback concedes controllable reproduction to the second-ranking male. Instead, the data suggest a "tug-of-war" scenario in which neither the dominant nor the second-ranking male has full control over his relative reproductive share. The two top-ranked males were typically unrelated and this, in combination with the mixed paternity of group offspring, means that multimale gorilla groups do not approximate family groups. Instead, as long-term assemblages of related and unrelated individuals, gorilla groups are similar to chimpanzee groups and so offer interesting possibilities for kin-biased interactions among individuals.
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