Female monkeys live longer with female friends: Study

Anthropology professors and field primatologists in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, have documented the daily lives of hundreds of large-brained capuchin monkeys.

Female capuchin monkeys who are more integrated into social networks with other adult females tend to live longer.

Social interactions measured include giving and receiving grooming, foraging nearby and helping each other in conflicts by fighting or making aggressive sounds and facial expressions.

White-faced capuchin monkeys engage in socially learned human-like rituals to test the quality of their friendships.

The latest findings, published recently in Behavioral Ecology, honed in on the relationship between female capuchins' social integration and survival.

The authors tracked the female monkeys' interactions with other females, males and companions of any sex and age, based on 18 years of data.

Their key finding -- adult female capuchins who are better integrated into social networks with other adult females survive longer.

There was no evidence that heterosexual relationships provided any survival-related benefits to females, at least regarding the types of behaviors measured in this study.

But this doesn't rule out the possibility that some adult females might benefit from social interactions with one or a few male partners who co-reside with them for long periods of time.

In the wild, the average lifespan of medium to large-sized monkeys is 15-20 years