Success comes from sticking with your monkey lover

Flora Graham, editor, newscientist.com

(Image: Gerard Lacz/Rex Features)

Owl monkey lovers have plenty of reasons to stay together - just gaze into these big brown eyes and you'll start to go a bit gooey, too. But they also benefit from having more babies if they avoid breaking up.

Owl monkey relationships are paragons of monogamy and co-parenting, with both parents expending lots of effort bringing up baby. But occasionally an interloper manages to split up a couple. Male and female monkeys that are single and looking for love may attack one member of a pair and drive it away. ?

By following owl monkey couples and observing such violent break-ups, researchers have discovered that having a partner evicted harms the reproductive success of the remaining mate. Monkeys with one partner produced 25 per cent more offspring per decade than those with two or more partners.

The male owl monkey's role as a hands-on dad may help explain why long-term monogamy and pair-bonding has such an impact on the animal's reproductive fitness. Males can be sure of their offspring's paternity, leading them to invest in their care. Females benefit from having someone to share the childcare.

The researchers believe that their observations of owl monkey romance sheds light on how shared child-rearing among humans gave rise to this crazy little thing called love.

"There's some consensus among anthropologists that pair-bonds must have played an important role in the origin of human societies," says Eduardo Fernandez-Duque of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who participated in the research.

"Call it love, call it friendship, call it marriage, there is something in our biology that leads to this enduring, emotional bond between two individuals that is widespread among human societies."

Are you feeling the love? Get a warm fuzzy feeling by reading more from our Love and sex?Topic Guide or find romance in our dating special.

Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0053724

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/289209c5/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A130C0A20Cowl0Emonkey0Evalentine0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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