Female Baboons Find a Secret to Longevity: Close Girlfriends

Apparently, in the animal kingdom, it's better to be a girl. We have seen that women macaques are superior conversationalists. We learned that lady humpbacks enjoy long-lasting friendships. Now research published in Current Biology shows that baboon ladies with good friends around them may live longer. At Botswana's Moremi Game Reserve, Joan Silk of the University of California, Los Angeles and her team spied on 44 female chacma baboons over the course of six years. Among other things, Silk looked at which girls had the most visitors and how often the women picked junk out of each other's hair. In other words, true friendship. She also tracked each baboon's circle of friends, seeing how each lady's top three buddies changed over time. Silk saw a correlation between sociability and longevity. She divided the baboons into three groups, and found that the least friendly lived 7 to 18 years, while the ...