Behavioral study on life-time development of Japanese macaques and gorillas.

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The present research includes behavioral observations on free-ranging Japanese macaques, gorillas in a captive group and giraffes and rhinoceros in captivity. There is variability in maternal style towards infants in Japanese macaques: infants with high protective mothers received less frequent grooming from others. Mothers tended to monitor their infants more frequently who had interactions with other group members. Moreover, adult females tend to have maintained grooming interactions with unrelated females for more than several years, while grooming interactions between closely related females tended to decrease with increasing age. In a captive group of gorillas, proximity relationships of the leader male with some adult females had been maintained more frequently than with other females for 12 years, indicating the presence of stability in the leader male-adult female relationships. Mother-calf relationships during a few years in captive giraffes and rhinoceros had been observed and, unlike nonhuman primatesin which mother-infant proximity decrease with increasing age, proximity between giraffe mothers and their calves remained much lower from the birth to the weaning period, while that in rhinoceros remained much higher even up to after the weaning. Comparison in maternal behavior and mother-infant relationships not only among primate species but also between nonhuman primates and non-primate mammals should be needed in order to understand a full picture of development in various mammals.