A Japanese macaque colony has gained its first alpha female leader in its 70-year history after a nine-year-old beat up her own mother and the ageing male competition to claim top spot.
Yakei has claimed her place as boss monkey in a 677-strong troop of at Takasakiyama Natural Zoological Garden on the island of Kyushu, following violence in which she defeated her mother, Bikei, as the top female in April, and two months later went after the alpha male, Sanchu, 31, who led the group for seven years.
Since then Yakei has acted as leader, climbing trees and shaking them, and walking with her tail up in displays of dominance and aggression that are extremely rare among the female macaques, staff at Takasakiyama say.
Her position was confirmed during a test of the new hierarchy, where supervisors left peanuts for the troop to see which of the senior monkeys would be first to take them. Sanchu deferred to Yakei, a gesture that confirmed her absolute power.
Staff at Takasakiyama, which opened in 1953, told the Nishinippon website that females had often risen through the ranks with the support of their male friends, but none had taken over the entire troop. They said that the ageing of the group’s top male monkeys may have been a factor in Yakei’s rise; in human years Sanchu would be a centenarian.
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Tadatoshi Shimomura, a staff member at the zoo, told the Mainichi newspaper: “Normally, female monkeys do not stand up against males. I’ve no idea why she became No 1. The world of macaques may be changing.”
Takasakiyama is home to about 1,500 macaques who are split between two troops — troop A and Yakei’s troop B — who live mainly in the forested mountain at the centre of the reserve.
The species are known to sometimes be aggressive towards humans, with visitors to the reserve advised not to maintain eye contact with them.