Primate Parenting Argumentative Essay

1) Perhaps the most important feature of primate parenting is how extensive their investment is in raising their children. Primate take great care of their offspring and expend a lot of energy and time raising them. This also goes along with the fact that primates mature fairly slowly, meaning more time is needed to care for them before they become independent/mature. This leads to primates being slow reproducers, taking longer before they're ready to have another child/children. Some primates also engage in certain parental behaviors fairly unique to them, such as allo-parenting, or infant parking. Both cases show how efficient primates are in expending their time and energy, so that care of the infant and productivity is at it's max. However …show more content…
For example, primates have relatively big/advanced brains when compared to most other mammals, yet this brain require more time to develop and mature, making the care of infant primates important and fairly taxing on the parents. This reduces the number of offspring a primate could have, which would in turn reduce that groups fitness. However primates learn ways to deal with this, such as allo parenting, in which non parent individuals assist in raising children, allowing parents to have more children. Another way the primates got around this obstacle is in polygyny groups where the women are dessignated a more maternal role in birthing and caring for the child, while the males will do other work for the group, like fending off predators, or gather food. This is made even more efficient with their sexual dimorphism, where their physical bodies are built differently so their better suited for their designated tasks. Another behavior used is extra pair copulation which increases the likelihood of infant survival, since other males will be less likely to kill another's offspring if they think it may be their own. And as already established having more offspring increases the fitness of the