Six days a week for 17 years, primatologists observed more than
65 female baboons in the Moremi Game Reserve, a national park in
Botswana. They tracked things like the baboons' social
interactions, their ranking within the group, and the survival
rates of their offspring. Now, a team of researchers has looked
at the data and found that the best way to predict whether a
baboon would live to adulthood is to look at the strength of its
mother's relationship with other females. The offspring of
females who formed strong social bonds with other
females–especially their mothers and adult daughters—lived
significantly longer than the offspring of mothers who formed
weaker bonds with these relatives. (The strongest social bonds
were shown to be between mothers and adult daughters, then
sisters.) Dorothy Cheney, a biologist at the University of
Pennsylvania who worked on the study, explains why surviving
into adulthood (about age 5 for baboons) is so important:
Females who raise offspring to a reproductive age are mor