page_title: Panamanian white-faced capuchin
section_title: Social structure
hierarchical_section_title: Panamanian white-faced capuchin / Behavior / Social structure
caption_attribution_description: English: White-faced Capuchin monkey (Cebus capucinus) in Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica.
context_page_description: The Panamanian white-faced capuchin, also known as the Panamanian white-headed capuchin or Central American white-faced capuchin, is a medium-sized New World monkey of the family Cebidae, subfamily Cebinae. Native to the forests of Central America, the white-faced capuchin is important to rainforest ecology for its role in dispersing seeds and pollen.
  Among the best known monkeys, the Panamanian white-faced capuchin is recognized as the typical companion to the organ grinder. In recent years the species has become popular in North American media, particularly in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series. It is a highly intelligent monkey and has been trained to assist paraplegic persons. It is a medium-sized monkey, weighing up to 3.9 kg. It is mostly black, but with a pink face and white on much of the front part of the body, giving it its common name. It has a distinctive prehensile tail that is often carried coiled up and is used to help support the monkey when it is feeding beneath a branch.
context_section_description: The Panamanian white-faced capuchin is a diurnal and arboreal animal. However, it does come down to the ground more often than many other New World monkeys. It moves primarily by walking on all four limbs. It
  lives in troops, or groups, of up to 40 monkeys (mean 16, range 4–40) and has a male/female adult sex ratio of 0.71 on average (range 0.54–0.88). With rare exceptions, females spend their entire lives with their female kin. Males migrate to new social groups multiple times during the course of their lifetimes, migrating for the first time between 20 months and 11 years of age.  The median age of migration in the Santa Rosa population is 4.5 years. Males sometimes migrate alone, but more often they migrate in the company of other males who are often their kin. One of the unusual features of the kinship structure of the Panamanian white-faced capuchin, relative to other primate species, is the high degree of relatedness within groups that results from the long tenures of alpha males who sire most of the offspring. Alpha males have been known to keep their positions as long as 17 years in this species and this puts them in the unusual position of being available to sire the offspring of their daughters and granddaughters, who produce their first offspring at about 6–7 years of age. Typically, however, alpha males do not breed with their own daughters, even though they do sire virtually all offspring produced by females unrelated to them. Those subordinate males who are allies of the alpha male in group defense are the males who sire the offspring of the alpha male's daughters. The high degree to which alpha males monopolize matings results in an unusually large number of paternal half-siblings and full siblings in this species relative to other primate species.
  Kinship is an important organizing factor in the structuring of female-female social relationships. Particularly in larger groups, females preferentially associate with, groom, and provide coalitionary support to their matrilineally related female kin. They do not exhibit a similar preference for their paternal half sisters, which may mean that they only are capable of recognizing kinship through the maternal line. Dominance rank is also an important organizing factor, with females more often grooming and associating with females who are closer to them in the dominance hierarchy. Female-female dyads groom far more than male-female and male-male dyads. Coalitionary aggression is common both among males and females, and capuchins seem to have an excellent understanding of the alliance structure in their group. For example, when capuchins are fighting, they sensibly recruit aid from someone who is both higher ranking than they are and also better friends with themselves than with their opponent.
  Female capuchins have linear dominance hierarchies. In contrast to many Old World monkeys such as macaques, in which females socially inherit the rank just below their mothers and just above their next oldest sisters, capuchins do not have a highly predictable ranking within their matrilines. Males are typically dominant to females. The alpha male is always easy to discern, but there are sometimes ambiguous rankings among subordinate males. Male-male relationships are tense, and affiliation between males is typically expressed by resting in contact, playing, or non-conceptive sex rather than by grooming. Males cooperate in coalitions against potential predators, and also in defense of the group against other males. Occasionally male coalitionary aggression becomes so violent that males are killed, particularly if they are encountered roaming the forest unaccompanied by allies. Because aggression from other male capuchins is the leading cause of death (aside from poaching by humans, where there is contact between humans and capuchins), male allies are critical for self-defense during migration, and to assist in taking over other groups. Male emigration to a new troop typically occurs about every 4 years, so most males are in constant danger of having to defend themselves aga
caption: Walking on four limbs
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