Grooming and Infant Handling Interchange in Macaca fascicularis: The Relationship Between Infant Supply and Grooming Payment

Female long-tailed macaques are attracted to infants and frequently groom mothers bearing them. Such grooming often involves the groomer contacting the infant and may be a trade of grooming for infant handling. To identify if grooming and infant handling are directly traded, I collected samples on times after female-to-mother grooming and on interactions in which a female groomed a mother and contacted her infant. I determined that grooming tended to promote an exchange with infant handling and that the supply of available infants was related to how long a female groomed a mother. Grooming interactions were longer when infants were scarce in the surrounding social environment than when they were abundant, indicating a possible supply-and-demand effect. This supports that grooming may be payment for infant handling. Grooming-infant handling interchanges tended to be unidirectional as mothers usually did not reciprocate grooming. Instead, infant contact occurred. A larger proportion of grooming-infant handling interchanges involved younger infants, but infant age did not seem to influence grooming durations. The length of female-to-mother grooming had no observable effect on handling time. Lower-ranked females groomed higher-ranked mothers and their infants longer than vice versa. Moreover, it was possible to predict up-rank grooming via supply and demand better than down-rank grooming. There was no observable influence of kinship on grooming-infant handling interchange. These results support the conclusion that grooming and infant handling may be traded. Grooming promoted infant handling, while supply and rank predicted the grooming payment a female would offer to access an infant.