Some baboons will toy with nearly anything that comes across their path. This restless test of oddities helps a baboon find new ways to get the most from almost any environment. Conformity and diversity work together for the betterment of the larger whole. Like bacterial and honeybee scouts, baboons spread out in small groups during the day. The foolhardily inquisitive among them comb the possibilities of the landscape.
Bacteria pool their exploratory discoveries via long-distance chemical communication.
But baboons , who are a good deal more mobile, gather at night in sleeping clusters which may include hundreds. These overnight conventions breed data processing. Because such emergency decisions seem to be influenced by males who have extensive experience with the environment, and because each individual's experiences will differ, it is easy enough to imagine that different Hamadryas troops might make different tactical decisions about direction of travel under similarly threatening circumstances - for better or worse. When the Pumphouse gang was in danger of being shot as pests by the inhabitants of a new army barracks who resented having their homes entered, tossed and probed for edibles, rescuers flew the crowd to a distant location. The displaced baboons had no idea of the groceries in the new landscape and of the best way to get at them.