Vervet monkeys solve a multiplayer "forbidden circle game" by queuing to learn restraint.

In social dilemmas, the ability of individuals to coordinate their actions is crucial to reach group optima. Unless exacted by power or force, coordination in humans relies on a common understanding of the problem, which is greatly facilitated by communication. The lack of means of consultation about the nature of the problem and how to solve it may explain why multiagent coordination in nonhuman vertebrates has commonly been observed only when multiple individuals react instantaneously to a single stimulus, either natural or experimentally simulated, for example a predator, a prey, or a neighboring group. Here we report how vervet monkeys solved an experimentally induced coordination problem. In each of three groups, we trained a low-ranking female, the "provider," to open a container holding a large amount of food, which the providers only opened when all individuals dominant to them ("dominants") stayed outside an imaginary "forbidden circle" around it. Without any human guidance, the dominants learned restraint one by one, in hierarchical order from high to low. Once all dominants showed restraint immediately at the start of the trial, the providers opened the container almost instantly, saving all individuals opportunity costs due to lost foraging time. Solving this game required trial-and-error learning based on individual feedback from the provider to each dominant, and all dominants being patient enough to wait outside the circle while others learned restraint. Communication, social learning, and policing by high-ranking animals played no perceptible role.

Supply and demand determine the market value of food providers in wild vervet monkeys.

Animals neither negotiate verbally nor conclude binding contracts, but nevertheless regularly exchange goods and services without overt coercion and manage to arrive at agreements over exchange rates. Biological market theory predicts that such exchange rates fluctuate according to the law of supply and demand. Previous studies showed that primates pay more when commodities become scarcer: subordinates groomed dominants longer before being tolerated at food sites in periods of shortage; females groomed mothers longer before obtaining permission to handle their infants when there were fewer newborns and males groomed fertile females longer before obtaining their compliance when fewer such females were present. We further substantiated these results by conducting a 2-step experiment in 2 groups of free-ranging vervet monkeys in the Loskop Dam Nature Reserve, South Africa. We first allowed a single low-ranking female to repeatedly provide food to her entire group by triggering the opening of a container and measured grooming bouts involving this female in the hour after she made the reward available. We then measured the shifts in grooming patterns after we added a second food container that could be opened by another low-ranking female, the second provider. All 4 providers received more grooming, relative to the amount of grooming they provided themselves. As biological market theory predicts, the initial gain of first providers was partially lost again after the introduction of a second provider in both groups. We conclude that grooming was fine-tuned to changes in the value of these females as social partners.