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Beast Buddies – Do Animals Have Friends?

That issue of preferred associates comes close to the human notion of friendship, and it can prove just as important in understanding animal goings-on as it does in people watching. Baboons, bats, and dozens of other animals have been studied from this perspective. Biologists may start by asking whether individuals prefer to hang out with particular buddies. But other questions soon pop up. Does the sex or kinship of a companion matter? Are there benefits to the association? The answers

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Social Behavior and communication in a herd of captive giraffe

Data on wild giraffe herds have often been interpreted as a random association of individuals, but the extent to which giraffe have a more complex social structure may have been overlooked. The focus of this dissertation is to investigate patterns of social relationships among individual giraffe. Social interaction and association (proximity and nearest neighbor) distributions among 6 female Rothschild’s giraffe in a captive herd at the San Diego Wild Animal Park were analyzed to identify and describe patterns of social

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Herd composition, kinship and fission–fusion social dynamics among wild giraffe

A variety of social systems have evolved as a consequence of competition and cooperation among individuals. Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis sp.) societies are an anomaly because the dearth of long-term data has produced two polar perspectives: a loose amalgamation of non-bonded individuals that sometimes coalesce into a herd and a structured social system with a fission–fusion process modifying herd composition within a community. We analysed 34 years of data collected from a population of Thornicroft’s giraffe (G. c. thornicrofti, Lydekker 1911)

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Age proximity influences herd composition in wild giraffe

In many mammalian species, animals form subunits within larger groups that are often associated with kinship and/or age proximity. Kinship mediates fission/fusion social dynamics of giraffe herds, but the role of age proximity has been unexamined. Here, we analyze 34 years of data from a population of Thornicroft’s giraffe, Giraffa camelopardalis thornicroftii, living in Zambia in order to assess the extent to which age proximity influences herd composition. We show for the first time that calves born into the same cohort

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