Shirley Strum's decades of fieldwork on olive baboons in Kenya reshaped how biologists think about primate societies, replacing a model built on male aggression with one built on long-term female relationships and something that looks, from the outside, like a favour economy.
Biologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute investigated a flexible social bee species, which helps shed light on the evolution of more complex organizational structures among other insects
Social animals, naked mole rats live in colonies of around 60 individuals, but groups of as much as 300 are not uncommon. They have a single queen, and the workers pull together to help the community survive and thrive. When enemies threaten, they attack together, on cue, a naked army of rodent warriors.
To communicate, they chirrup, chatter, gruntle and squeak. If you’ve ever come within close p…
