The 1960′s seem to have been a good time for theories about social processes, cooperation, and competition and they collected a lot of data based on the theories. I suspect that many of the broad conclusions from this era were frequently wrong, but the books they wrote have a lot of fascinating observations organized by these sorts of themes.
Your post-script reminded me of “noyau” from the book The Territorial Imperative (1966). A noyau in a canonical form is a geographic clumping of organisms of the same species who squabble and fight incessantly (which seems to indicate that they don’t like each other’s presence) but who do not actually seem to be constrained by environmental resource limitations from dispersing across the landscape. There is plenty of empty space, but they ignore it almost as if they are built so that they enjoy forming themselves into small groups and then dramatically squabbling with other small groups within the larger noyau.
I can imagine a lot of theories that might be made up to account for such observations, and I’m not sure of any of them are true so I won’t bother with specific theorizing, but I just thought it would be interesting to other readers to read about these situations. Chapter five is the one specifically about noyau.
noyau: A French liqueur made in the past from brandy and bitter almonds or apricot kernels, sometimes coloured pink.
{noyau, animals} got me:
Noyau: Animals have overlapping home ranges, and the sexes don’t live together. There’s no territoriality. Each female has a home range while males have larger home ranges that cover several female ranges. This is the system seen in orangutans. Usually goes with a promiscuous mating system.
The thing Robert Ardrey, the author, was trying to describe under the term “noyau” in his book (which is online in its entirety) was probably distinct from mate competition because the author had already covered leks in a previous chapter and was trying to talk about seemingly distinct behavior that was also related to “space management by animals”.
If you look at the chapter on noyau that I linked to you’ll find (among other things) a popular recounting of the behavior of Callicebus moloch ornatus, studied by William A. Mason. The report is that these monkeys have very precisely defined territories where entire family groups (mother, father, and kids) line up in the mornings to shriek and scuffle with neighboring family groups. The species is not especially sexually dimorphic and males and females pair bond for life… but when the females are in heat once a year all the territories dissolve and there is basically an orgy. Afterwards, the families reform as before and go back to squabbling with each other every morning.
My guess is that this book has packaged up a lot of interesting stories from animal ethology and used terms and theory that may have been partially novel with the novelty partially catching on in larger scientific circles (and so the contents of the book may be interwoven with falsehood and/or be difficult to google by this point). It was the stories themselves about actual animals, in the specific links that I was trying to gesture towards as “potentially interesting”.
The 1960′s seem to have been a good time for theories about social processes, cooperation, and competition and they collected a lot of data based on the theories. I suspect that many of the broad conclusions from this era were frequently wrong, but the books they wrote have a lot of fascinating observations organized by these sorts of themes.
Your post-script reminded me of “noyau” from the book The Territorial Imperative (1966). A noyau in a canonical form is a geographic clumping of organisms of the same species who squabble and fight incessantly (which seems to indicate that they don’t like each other’s presence) but who do not actually seem to be constrained by environmental resource limitations from dispersing across the landscape. There is plenty of empty space, but they ignore it almost as if they are built so that they enjoy forming themselves into small groups and then dramatically squabbling with other small groups within the larger noyau.
I can imagine a lot of theories that might be made up to account for such observations, and I’m not sure of any of them are true so I won’t bother with specific theorizing, but I just thought it would be interesting to other readers to read about these situations. Chapter five is the one specifically about noyau.
I tried Google. First, I got:
noyau: A French liqueur made in the past from brandy and bitter almonds or apricot kernels, sometimes coloured pink.
{noyau, animals} got me:
Noyau: Animals have overlapping home ranges, and the sexes don’t live together. There’s no territoriality. Each female has a home range while males have larger home ranges that cover several female ranges. This is the system seen in orangutans. Usually goes with a promiscuous mating system.
Is the squabbling actually mate competition?
The thing Robert Ardrey, the author, was trying to describe under the term “noyau” in his book (which is online in its entirety) was probably distinct from mate competition because the author had already covered leks in a previous chapter and was trying to talk about seemingly distinct behavior that was also related to “space management by animals”.
If you look at the chapter on noyau that I linked to you’ll find (among other things) a popular recounting of the behavior of Callicebus moloch ornatus, studied by William A. Mason. The report is that these monkeys have very precisely defined territories where entire family groups (mother, father, and kids) line up in the mornings to shriek and scuffle with neighboring family groups. The species is not especially sexually dimorphic and males and females pair bond for life… but when the females are in heat once a year all the territories dissolve and there is basically an orgy. Afterwards, the families reform as before and go back to squabbling with each other every morning.
My guess is that this book has packaged up a lot of interesting stories from animal ethology and used terms and theory that may have been partially novel with the novelty partially catching on in larger scientific circles (and so the contents of the book may be interwoven with falsehood and/or be difficult to google by this point). It was the stories themselves about actual animals, in the specific links that I was trying to gesture towards as “potentially interesting”.