Do Any Animals Know Their Grandparents?

Pedro_P

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Does this wee elephant know its grandparents?
Credit: Shutterstock
▼ Grandparents are revered in many human societies. But telling stories about old times and overfeeding grandchildren seem like distinctly human traits. Are these classic grandparent behaviors really limited toHomo sapiens? Do any animals know their grandparents the way people do?
For most species on Earth, the answer is an unequivocal no. "Usually, there aren't grandparents [around] anymore" when an animal is born, said Mirkka Lahdenperä, a biologist at the University of Turku in Finland. Even if an animal's life span does overlap with its grandparents', most species spread out to avoid competing for resources, so the odds of running into a grandparent are slim.
But there are a few notable exceptions, primarily among mammals that live in close-knit social groups. In her book "The Social Behavior of Older Animals" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), Canadian zoologist Anne Innis Dagg described troops of langur monkeys in India in which older females commingled with their daughters and grandchildren.
The grandmother langurs have a particular job: They aggressively defend the group's infants against attacks from humans, dogs and rival monkeys. Some female langurs even give their own grandchildren special treatment, grooming them and stepping in when they play too roughly with other young.
Many whale species, too, travel in family pods that include both grandmothers and grandcalves. In groups of sperm whales, according to Dagg, old females help babysit the group's young while their mothers dive for food.
Orca grandmothers often lead their pods and can live for decades after they stop reproducing. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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mazherali

Wonder what is the evolutionary basis for the male grandpa neglecting the family