Jo Setchell

She might, or she'll have her kid with her, but no one else.

If anyone else tries to join her, make a group, then there wouldn't be enough food.

It does get more complicated than this, but that's the basic.

Then if you can have two females living together...

then they might allow a male to join them.

There are advantages to having a male join you.

You avoid harassment from other males.

You probably do better in terms of protection from predators eating you.

But at the same time, the bigger the group, the more likely the predator is to find you.

And then if there's plenty of food, then you can have a large group of animals.

And when there's a large group of females, no one male can control access to them.

It is complete chaos, exactly.

With a bit of order underneath.

So where you have just one female, she might choose to share her area, we call it home range, with one male.

And she might also choose to only reproduce with that one male.

But she could also share her home range with one male and reproduce with other males.

So when I started studying mandrills, I was attracted to them because they're very colourful.

And I wanted to know whether there's a pin-up effect, so whether the most colourful animal is the most impressive, perhaps attractive to females and so on.

And...

I've been studying them now for decades.