Animal “Queens” Reveal Surprising Complexities of Social Power

By Cat Bohannon

What are female animals for? The question seems ridiculous—a leathery anachronism. But in Queens, a new nature docuseries from National Geographic, a focus on female power and how it works lodges this question squarely where it hurts. Somehow simply asking what happens when the female of the species is put in the center of the frame is a revolutionary idea.

Queens is the first such documentary to look solely at animal matriarchies, and there’s plenty of recent research on this topic to provide surprise and delight. Narrated by Angela Bassett, one of the reigning queens of American cinema, the series argues for the value in looking at female animals making choices about their lives in the context of other females. Call it the Bechdel test, but make it lions.

All the usual nature documentary players are here, as you’d expect from a big-budget series that shares backstage ties with BBC’s Planet Earth. Framed by sweeping, aerial shots of respirating forests, charismatic beasts such as orcas and elephants and primates give a good hair toss between bloody feats of strength. But we also meet a few newcomers that unexpectedly steal the spotlight, such the South American orchid bee. (Some well-known matriarchies are missing, but perhaps the naked mole rat wasn’t screen-ready.)

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In the field of biology more broadly, the pursuit to better understand the female body on its own terms is massively changing our models of how a great many things simply work in mammals, including metabolism, cellular repair, and the interaction of the immune system and gut microbiome. Sex differences, now that we’re studying them in the lab, are turning up everywhere.

But does looking squarely at matriarchies change our understanding of social power? Queens shows that female power is about, well, the same things that power is generally about: competition, dominance, and access to food, friendship and the occasional good lay. In one episode, a hyena cub is slaughtered because of a rivalry between mothers. We see it happening mostly at a distance—body horror this is not. When I asked executive producer Vanessa Berlowitz about this moment, she explained that she chose to leave out the more explicit footage and focus more on group dynamics. We see, instead, hyenas that are sated from a recent kill, their heads red and matted.

Among the orchid bees, female social power gets more complex. This—in addition to the amazing drone camerawork that captures tiny bees zooming through dense rain forest—makes the animals especially satisfying to watch. While it’s true these “queens” fit into a typical model of matriarchy, there’s more at play. Orchid flowers attract male bees with their volatile scent compounds, in part because the males don’t make their own pheromones. Instead the males collect a kind of custom perfume in special pouches on their hind legs, which they then release in a smelly waft when they’re near a female. Females will then choose between the best-scented males to mate with. Here a well-stained bed, if you like, of flowers mimics the biochemical signatures of bee sex to fuel their own reproduction.

It is, in other words, not so simple to separate social power from other beings in one’s environment. The camera mostly tracks competition for territory, and in one astonishing scene, we see a female insect unzip a pouch of another female’s eggs and lay her own in their place for her competitor to unknowingly raise as her own. But the premise of these females competing for social power and genetic dominance always feels freshly in relation to the plant world they inhabit—one that is, of course, rapidly disappearing because of climate change.

Is Queens, then, really a new idea? It certainly tries to be. Take the soundtrack: During moments where we might expect swelling strings and the voice of an Attenborough, we instead get a bangin’ mix of world music and American hip-hop. A broad-shouldered male bonobo swaggers down a tree to the slippery beats of a club track, and we watch the bonobo equivalent of a teen girl eye him the whole way down with her mouth gaping open.

This male, we later learn, is the son of an alpha female in a neighboring group. What’s particularly true of matriarchies is that a lot of social power is distributed among the male offspring of a reigning queen. In matriarchies, then, inheritance can exert quite a bit more pressure on males, precisely because male power is so directly tied to one’s mother. Among orca whales, for instance, males whose mother dies tend to do poorly soon after.

But besides the orca, we barely see or hear about male offspring. There’s only a brief mention that bonobo males stay with their mother for life, while females leave their home troupe to find a mate. While I was watching the series, I often wondered: What happened to all the Y chromosomes?

The invisibility of the males was intentional. Berlowitz explained that the show’s producers had specifically asked the filmmakers to track the females of the bonobo group preferentially. (The series was done in consultation and collaboration with field biologists and conservationists.) Perhaps the main reason Queens feels new, then, is because it’s not the norm to preferentially track female animals. The default of paying attention to what males do means we rarely have any clue what females are doing when their behavior isn’t serving male goals.

One thing Queens doesn’t quite get to is how comparative behaviorists are starting to rethink the whole matriarchal-patriarchal divide. To be fair, this involves more recent research. For example, primatologists are reconsidering what female social power does in wild chimp populations. Chimpanzees are patriarchal and patrilocal by most definitions, but those definitions may have some flaws: An increasing body of research suggests female chimps have considerable influence in the function of their local society. Though females migrate once at adolescence, just as we see the bonobos do in Queens, they probably won’t migrate again. Once they’re established in their new society, their sons can and do “inherit” their mother’s rank, which then makes them far more likely to be materially and socially favored as they advance in life. The boons to such princes are a queenly gift, indeed.