Social Touch in Apes and Dolphins
Social touch, or physical contact among two or more individuals in a nonaggressive context, seems to play important roles among both primates and cetaceans. However, with exception of social grooming among primates, it has rarely been studied in detail. T
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Social Touch in Apes and Dolphins Michio Nakamura and Mai Sakai
The online version of this chapter (doi: 10.1007/978-4-431-54523-1_19) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users M. Nakamura (*) • M. Sakai JSPS Research Fellow, Wildlife Research Center, Kyoto University, 2-24, Tanaka-Sekiden-Cho, Sakyo, Kyoto 606-8203, Japan e-mail: [email protected] J. Yamagiwa and L. Karczmarski (eds.), Primates and Cetaceans: Field Research and Conservation of Complex Mammalian Societies, Primatology Monographs, DOI 10.1007/978-4-431-54523-1_19, © Springer Japan 2014
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M. Nakamura and M. Sakai
Abstract Social touch, or physical contact among two or more individuals in a nonaggressive context, seems to play important roles among both primates and cetaceans. However, with exception of social grooming among primates, it has rarely been studied in detail. Thus, in this chapter we review the descriptions of social touch in great apes and dolphins from the literature and from our own observations. After reviewing the social grooming among various mammalian taxa, we considered various types of social touch in apes and dolphins in more detail by dividing them into following seven categories: (1) social touch between mother and infant; (2) touch in play; (3) tactile gestures; (4) social grooming; (5) touch in greeting, reassurance, and appeasement; (6) touch to/with genital areas; and (7) simple body contact. Information from scattered descriptions in the literature suggests that social touch is widespread in apes and dolphins, yet frequencies may vary greatly among species. Although there has been no single theory to explain these diverse types of social touch, we briefly review theories that might be of relevance to explaining social touch. Keywords Dolphins • Flipper rubbing • Great apes • Odontocetes • Physical contact • Social grooming • Social interaction • Tactile communication
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Introduction
Primates and cetaceans form complex and diverse societies (primates: Itani 1977; Smuts et al. 1987; cetaceans: Mann et al. 2000). A society is neither a visible entity nor is it a simple accumulation of individual behaviors but emerges through many types of social interactions among individuals. Thus, it is important to begin by examining social interactions to study different types of societies. Social interactions occur through a number of modalities, and in this chapter, we particularly focus on “social touch”—touch between two or more individuals. This focus is because physical contact, except for grooming behavior, has rarely been studied, even though it seems to play important social roles among both primates and cetaceans. In addition to the tactile modality, mammals use visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and olfactory modalities in the course of their social interaction. Vocal communication has been extensively studied both in primates (Gouzoules and Gouzoules 2007) and in cetaceans (Tyack 2000, 2003) and compared to human language (primates: Itani 1963; Marler 1965; Arcadi 1996; ceta
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