[Animals] Friendship between animals strengthens their offspring

[Love Pulse]

https://www.alkhaleej.ae/ملحق/الصداقة-بين-الحيوانات-تقوي-أنسالها

 

 

 

 

Prepared by: Ashraf Marhali
It is natural for a person to have a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, and friends, but has it ever crossed our minds that animals also make friends with each other, and that friendship is not exclusive to human beings?
Friendship is that strong relationship wrapped in love and serenity and sealed with the seal of sincerity and honesty, and it is that warm home, where we throw troubles, share worries and exchange secrets, and whoever studies the animal world will find that applied in one way or another.
According to the magazine "New Scientist", the number of friends is linked to the brain's ability to invest in friendship, and most animals retain knowledge, and the formation of friendships is limited to limited types of them, which can establish real friendships, such as mammals, including great apes, and some members of the family of horses, elephants, whales, and camels. . It is not strange for these animals to live within stable and interconnected groups. Living in groups has its advantages, but that does not mean that these groups do not live under pressure, and one of their members can escape if the pressures exceed the endurance limit, hence the friendship, which forms a wall. A strong repelling prevents any member of the group from being harmed, without the need to flee from its space. Friendship strengthens social groups, and gives them a different structure, and the animal within a cohesive society sees that this society consists of several layers like an onion, where the best friends are in the heart Or the middle, and in the other classes there are individuals with whom he has a lukewarm relationship.
The matter does not differ according to the type of animal, everyone sees that in the heart there are five good friends, and in the closest layer there are 15, while in the following layers the number increases to 50 friends, and each layer has its benefits, while good friends provide personal protection and help, it can be relied on Friends of the other classes provide food, and the group as a whole can be relied upon for the purpose of self-defense against the aggressors.
The animal within the herd must know its neighbor, and then it must be aware of the structure of the herd and its social network, and therefore its importance. If there is an intention to threaten an individual, this threat will include neighbors and friends who will rise up to defend the threatened individual.
The cognitive and cognitive requirements for this are reflected in the relationship between the size of an individual’s social group and the size of his brain, or in a more clear sense, the relationship between the size of the frontal lobes in the brain, within which all considerations and data related to social relationships are processed, and what matters here is the complexity of the individual’s relationships with others, not just the number of relationships Therefore, intelligent monkeys, such as baboons and macaques, need their brains to be larger in order to deal with large groups, which is not needed by the less intelligent monkey.
Sometimes this relationship between the size of the group and the brain size of its members is referred to as the "social brain hypothesis", which has been proven to be applicable not only to species but also to individuals.
Several studies conducted on macaque and human samples have concluded that the number of friends an individual has is related to the size of the parts of the frontal lobes of the brain, and complex social decisions taken by the animal require different forms of awareness and understanding, the most important of which is a certain ability known as sanity, which is the ability to understand The content of the other's brain, the size of the basic areas in the frontal cortex determines the mental abilities, which in turn determines the number of friends.

Many types of living organisms can form and maintain friendships through social training, for example, humans use beautification and petting, which causes the release of endorphins in the brain, causing a feeling of comfort and confidence, and the larger the group and the number of its members increases, the greater the time period in which the organism allocates time to beautify And courtship, but the number of beneficiaries of this beautification and petting decreases, and the reason is that the greater the number of members of the group, with which the pressure placed on it increases, there is a greater need to ensure trust in friends and to ensure that they provide assistance when necessary, and the person is willing to do that by spending more From social time to adornment and petting with his friends, and for female monkeys, this proved beneficial, as research has found that females who maintain strong friendships produce less amounts of the stress hormone "cortisol", and develop offspring with greater ability to survive.
And since the quality of the friendship relationship depends on the length of time allocated to it and to maintain and strengthen it, the number of friends that the animal can keep decreased, and then the total size of the groups decreased. Whenever the animal tries to accumulate a larger number, it ends up not being able to allocate time, and thus the quality of friendship relations is affected and the group destabilizes and is on the path to collapse.
This is for animals. As for humans, the matter is different. Over the past two million years, social pressures have increased, and larger social groups have developed and grown. Based on the social brain hypothesis, scientists said that the size of the human group increased by 150 times, but the question here is: How can a person adapt this Huge groups and maintain strong social bonds?
According to the scientists, we seem to have made good use of three additional patterns of behavior that enabled us to release enough endorphins to make more friends at the same time. The researchers considered laughter as the first of these behaviors, and it is a common activity that can only be practiced in the presence of more than one individual. After 500,000 years, the second type of behavior appeared, which is singing and dancing, which enhanced the number of individuals who benefited from fertilization. After that, the language developed and imposed greater control over laughter (he was limited to jokes), and greater control over singing and dancing, and this eventually led to the formation of huge groups.
Although we can feel a connection to these huge groups of thousands of individuals, most of us do not have more than 150 friends within our social network, about half of them are family members, and our relationship with them is eternal and cannot be broken with the passage of time. As for other non-family relationships, they are liable to collapse if we do not invest enough time in them. The inability to spend time with a friend for a year, for example, reduces the quality of our friendship with him by a third. Although friends can change with the course of time, the secret to our ability to keep them remains elusive. Each of us has our own personality pattern that determines how social capital is distributed, whether in terms of time spent with friends or social and emotional closeness with them. Our closest friends, for example, do not win more time than others, and it is a fixed personal social nature that does not change with the change of friends.