Play Initiating Behaviors and Responses in Red Colobus Monkeys

Red colobus monkeys are playful primates, making them an important species in which to study animal play. The author examines play behaviors and responses in the species for its play initiation events, age differences in initiating frequency and initiating behavior, and the types of social play that result from specific initiating behaviors. Out of the eighteen attempts to initiate play observed by the author, four resulted in play fighting, six in social-locomotor play, four in aggressive rebuffs, and four in passive withdrawals. Old infants proved both the primary initiators and targets of play initiation attempts. Fourteen attempts involved contact with the target animal, suggesting that contact is a species-specific strategy used to initiate play. The author found no relationship however, between specific initiating behaviors and the type of social play that ensued. The author discusses the limitations of the study and directions for future research. Key words: Kibale; play fighting; play initiation; Procolobus rufomitratus; red colobus monkeys; rough-and-tumble play; social-locomotor playMonkeys, like humans, have an extended period of immaturity, during which they spend a good deal of time in play. Play dominates the activity of infant primates and remains one of the top three or four activities of juvenile and adolescent primates (Fagen 1981; Roopnarine and Johnson 1994). Highly social creatures, primates find initiating social play and learning to respond properly to play solicitations to be important skills they must master as early as possible. Depending upon the taxonomy, experts consider the number of extant primate species to range between 190 and 300-200 species can serve us as a reasonable approximation (World Wildlife Fund 2012). But because most primates, regardless of species, live in highly stratified environments such as rainforests whose intractable conditions make viewing their complex behavior difficult, detailed studies of play in the wild are rare and involve only a few species. Researchers have conducted, however, numerous studies of captive primates at play.In this article, I look at occurrences of play initiation in a group of red colobus monkeys (Procolobus rufomitratus) in Kibale National Park in Uganda. Although difficult study conditions led to a limited data set, these preliminary results add a new dimension to our knowledge of red colobus monkeys at play. It is an intriguing species to use to study play initiation because red colobus infants and juveniles devote approximately 27 percent of their activity to play (Worch 2002, 2010), which far exceeds the times reported for other primate-not to mention nonprimate-species. For example, vervets spend 13 percent of their time at play (Govindarajulu et al. 1993); cheetahs, 8 percent (Caro 1995); and meerkats, 3 percent (Sharpe 2002). Despite the propensity of red colobuses for play, however, we know little about how they initiate it.Among the primate species that have been studied extensively in the wild, the amount of time they play-and, to a lesser extent, the types of play in which they engage-vary remarkably. Still, they share a number of characteristics.The amount of time on average individual red colobuses spend in play tends-as it does with humans-to decline with age (Fagen 1993). This reduction in play may result from physiological changes that lead to increased aggressiveness (Caine 1986; Lewis and Barton 2006) and to reduced responsiveness to play solicitations (Levy 1979; Lewis and Barton 2006). Social influences that encourage work-a-day, adult-like behavior may also have a role in reducing play time. For nonhuman primates in particular, weaning requires youngsters to fend for their own nutritional needs and actually helps define the onset of the juvenile period (Subcommittee on Conservation of Natural Populations 1981). Thus, much of the time once available for play during infancy must be devoted to finding food during juvenility. …