Estudio de la integración de tres nuevos chimpancés dentro de un grupo ya formado a través del análisis de redes sociales

Abstract

Nowadays chimpanzees are used in the world of entertainment, television and are used as pets in private homes. This means that they are separated from their mothers since they are babies and do not learn social behaviours towards other chimpanzees, such as grooming, kissing or simply playing with each other. In 2015 Coco, Bea and Tom arrived at the “Fundació MONA”, a centre that welcomes chimpanzees that have been mistreated. The objective of this study has been to monitor how these three chimpanzees have been integrated into the already formed group called Bilinga. In order to carry out this objective, we recorded data with the ZooMonitor software and then, through the UCINET application, descriptive analyses have been carried out to verify the number of times and the percentage of grooming that are issued and received by the different individuals in the group. In addition, social networks analysis has been carried out through which it has been observed which individuals are more integrated in the group and how is the integration at the group level. Once these analyses were carried out, we were able to verify that the individuals emit and receive grooming in a preferential way towards another individual in their group. We have also detected that Coco, Bea and Tom at the beginning, in 2015, only maintained grooming behaviours among the three of them, but in 2019 Coco extended this behaviour with other individuals. In addition, these three chimpanzees, after four years living with the group of Bilinga, become the three individuals that more grooming behaviours emit and receive to the rest of partners. Finally, it must be said that they have had a good integration within the group, they went from being the least integrated when they arrived in 2015 to the most integrated within the group. Integration at the individual level has been calculated in the social networks analysis based on the centrality index. On the other hand, integration at the group level has been calculated from the index of centralization. Although the study subjects are the most integrated, integration at the group level has remained low over the years, so these chimpanzees still need many years of recovery