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Impacts of Intergroup Interactions on Intragroup Behavioral Changes in Javan Gibbons (Hylobates moloch)

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Abstract

Agonistic intergroup interactions can cause individual costs such as physical injuries, increased physiological stress, and disrupted intragroup social relationships. Therefore, individuals should employ behavioral strategies to minimize the cost associated with aggressive intergroup encounters (IGEs). We investigated the behavioral strategies of territorial, pair-living Javan gibbons (Hylobates moloch) in response to intergroup aggression, including 1) changes in activity budgets, 2) affiliative behaviors within pairs, and 3) potential intergroup avoidance strategies, such as sleeping tree selection. We observed 129 encounters in three habituated gibbon groups surrounded by four unhabituated groups in Gunung Halimun-Salak National Park, Java, from 2014 to 2016. Overall, gibbons significantly altered their activity budgets during IGEs: they foraged less and were less active than when there was no encounter. We also found a decrease in grooming within pairs following IGEs compared to a matched-control period. However, we did not find any effects of the intensity of aggression, outcome, length of, or female participation in IGEs on grooming within pairs in the hour after an encounter. Male gibbons slept farther away from the IGE location after aggressive IGEs than after neutral encounters. Our results suggest that not only primates living in large groups but also primates living in small groups, such as Javan gibbons, may develop behavioral strategies to deal with direct (during encounters), immediate (within 1 h after encounters), and possibly longer (at the end of a day with encounters) effects of intergroup interactions.

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Acknowledgments

Amore Pacific Academic and Cultural Foundation (AACF), Ewha Womans University, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) supported this work. This project was conducted in collaboration with the Department of Natural Resource Conservation and Ecotourism at the Institut Pertanian Bogor (IPB). We thank the Indonesian Ministry of Research and Technology (RISTEK), the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry’s Department for the Protection and Conservation of Nature (PHKA), and the Gunung Halimun-Salak National Park (GHSNP) for the research permissions. We thank Agus Hikmat, Rinekso Soekmadi, Ani Mardiastuti, Mirza Kusrini, and GHSNP staffs for their assistance and cooperation. We also thank Sanha Kim for contributions to the establishment of the field site; Sunyoung Ahn for administrative support and coordination in Korea; Rahayu Oktaviani for administrative support and coordination in Indonesia; and our field assistants, Muhamad Nur, Ri Rudini, Isra Kurnia, and Iyan Sopian, for their hard work in the field. We are grateful to Yena Kim for the helpful comments and Kyungmin Kim for helping us with the graphical output. We thank Dr. Sarie Van Belle, Dr. Cyril C Grueter, and Dr. Takeshi Furuichi for organizing the special issue on dynamics of intergroup relationships in primates. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable and constructive comments.

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YY and JCC conceived and designed the study. YY collected relevant data in the field and performed statistical analyses. EK generated spatial analyses. YY drafted the manuscript. CF critically revised the manuscript and all authors approved the manuscript to be published.

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Correspondence to Jae C. Choe.

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Yi, Y., Fichtel, C., Kim, E. et al. Impacts of Intergroup Interactions on Intragroup Behavioral Changes in Javan Gibbons (Hylobates moloch). Int J Primatol 41, 363–381 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-019-00116-8

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