ABSTRACT
Because food availability is expected to be most limiting to an adult female’s reproductive success relative to other factors, such as availability of mates (Trivers 1972; Wrangham 1980), I examined contests over foods and resulting dominance relationships in detail. I was able to study contest competition and dominance among adult female vervets on Segera as they used two distinct types of habitat that exhibited differing patterns of food availability. Whereas a number of studies have demonstrated the effects that food availability has on agonism over foods between individuals within a group (Cheney & Seyfarth 1990; Izar 2004; Roeder & Fornasieri 1995; Struhsaker & Gartlan 1970; Symington 1988; Whitten 1983; Wrangham 1981), it is less clear that competition over foods produces the dominance patterns predicted by the models of female social behavior. I specifically investigate the assumed link between contest competition over food and the resulting female dominance relationships for vervets on Segera.
