What Group of Animals Is a Congress?

If you’ve seen a “congress” of animals on a quiz or in a meme, the answer you’ll usually find is salamanders, though baboons get the name just as often online.¹ Neither label has much standing. Both belong to a playful tradition of group names that sound official but are rarely used by anyone.

Salamanders Get the Congress Label

A salamander is an amphibian shaped a bit like a lizard, with a long body and a tail.² Salamanders are related to frogs, while lizards are reptiles. A salamander’s skin feels damp and smooth, and a lizard’s is dry and scaly.

Because salamanders’ skin has no scales, they need damp places to live. So they often end up in the same cool, wet spots, under logs or in pools, where their bodies stay cool and lose less water.³

The salamander “congress” appears mainly on trivia and education sites rather than in dictionaries. Biologists don’t use it; they just say a group of salamanders.

A group name is a stretch here for another reason. Salamanders under the same log are usually not a social group; each animal picked the same damp spot on its own. Most adults live solitary lives and don’t travel, feed or defend anything as a unit.

Is A Congress Of Baboons Real

The president of the Dictionary Society of North America could find no evidence that “congress” is the correct term for baboons. In his words, apparently someone just made it up.⁴ A baboon researcher said she had never heard “congress” used for baboons. The correct term for a group of baboons is a troop.⁵

Dictionaries agree. Oxford’s list of group terms calls gatherings of baboons, monkeys and kangaroos troops. The only group it calls a congress is Congress itself, the legislature.⁶

The baboon claim most likely spread through viral posts and memes, often as a joke about politicians. Repetition did the rest: when the same claim shows up on page after page, an invented term starts to look established.

Troop is what zoologists and zoo signs use. Saying “a troop of baboons” is always safe, and no expert will correct you.

To check any group name you doubt, look it up in a major dictionary or a list of group terms. If only trivia pages and social posts carry it, treat it as a joke or an invention.

Where Fancy Animal Group Names Come From

In the 1400s it became fashionable to coin hunting terms, producing hundreds of names for animal groups. An educated gentleman was expected to know these terms, even with no practical use for them.⁷ Books then cataloged them, most famously the Book of Saint Albans of 1486.⁸⁹ That book became the go-to reference and pushed many of the terms into English.¹⁰ Today they’re often called medieval hunting group names, and the old name for them is “terms of venery.”

Many were wordplay describing a trait or mood of the animal. A few caught on for good, like a pride of lions.

These lists were presented as hunting language but were clearly fanciful, so whether hunters ever used them is doubtful.¹¹ Writers from the 1800s on copied the old lists, not always accurately. As a result, many “proper” terms are known today only from such lists, with little evidence of real use.¹²

A term appearing in a famous old book shows that someone wrote it down, not that ordinary people said it. The words people actually say are herd, flock, troop, pack and school.

How A Baboon Troop Really Works

GPS tracking of wild baboons shows that they decide where to travel together.¹³ Rather than following the most dominant animal, they tend to follow when several baboons start off the same way. When a few begin walking in one direction, others who are paying attention may join, and the movement grows from those early followers. When two directions compete, the troop picks one if the directions are far apart, so it doesn’t split up. If the directions are close, it splits the difference and goes somewhere in between.¹⁴ No single animal has to give an order; staying together comes from each baboon responding to its neighbors.

Family matters too. Adult female baboons back close maternal relatives in fights far more often than distant relatives or unrelated females.¹⁵ They also generally support distant relatives a bit more than non-relatives.¹⁶

Hamadryas baboons live in layers: troops, bands, clans and one-male units.¹⁷ A one-male unit is one adult male with several females and their young. Several units form a clan, and clans form a band. A clan is several one-male families that sleep on cliffs near each other and forage close together.¹⁸ A troop is the large gathering at the sleeping cliffs. This structure is thought to help them cope with patchy food while staying together against predators.¹⁹

What Salamanders Do When They Gather

Male red-legged salamanders use courtship pheromones, which are chemical signals, during mating.²⁰ Females exposed to the pheromones spent about 2.7 times as long on male scent, which suggests the signal draws a female’s attention to the male.²¹ The mix matters, too: certain pheromone blends cut courtship time to around 43 minutes and made females roughly 23% more receptive.²² Because the signal is chemical, it works in dark, wet places where sight is of little use.

Many salamanders gather each spring at temporary woodland pools to breed, walking there on the first warm, rainy nights. Some towns close roads or run volunteer crossings for them, and drivers near woodland ponds do well to slow down on wet spring nights.

A whole local population may breed in one pool, so losing the pool or the forest around it can wipe out that group. Spotted salamanders decline when forest within about 100 m of the pool falls below roughly 30% cover.²³ After forest around Massachusetts pools was cleared, breeding numbers dropped most where more forest was lost.²⁴

The pool is only part of a salamander’s world, since adults live on the forest floor around it for most of the year. When trees are removed, the ground gets drier and warmer, which is hard on animals with moist skin. If you own land near a spring pool, keeping trees around it helps. Leave a band of trees and leaf litter rather than clearing to the water’s edge. And if you find a salamander, don’t move it far from where you found it.

Other Government Style Group Names

Some of these point to something real. Crows do gang up on hawks and owls, calling and diving at them to drive them off, so “mob” fits. “Murder” is a poetic name that doesn’t describe anything crows do. Owls are mostly solitary, so a parliament is rarely seen.

Scientists use plain words like group or flock, and so should anything meant to be accurate, such as a school report. If you aren’t sure a term is real, a plain word is never wrong and doesn’t pass along an invention.

Real groups exist for real reasons. A main benefit of living in groups is a lower risk of being eaten.²⁹ More eyes spot predators sooner, and each animal’s chance of being picked is smaller.³⁰ Zebras in larger herds, for example, spend less time watching for lions.³¹

1
Study.com. What group of animals is called a congress? ↩︎
2
Study.com. What group of animals is called a congress? ↩︎
3
PubMed Central. The Bogert effect revisited: Salamander regulatory behaviors are differently constrained by time and space ↩︎
4
American Nurse. A congress of baboons? ↩︎
5
American Nurse. A congress of baboons? ↩︎
6
ThoughtCo. The Term for a Group of Baboons: It’s Not a Congress ↩︎
7
Once Upon A Lexicon. Let’s Talk About… Terms of Venery (Collective Nouns Pt. 2) ↩︎
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Once Upon A Lexicon. Let’s Talk About… Terms of Venery (Collective Nouns Pt. 2) ↩︎
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Macquarie. Common Collective Nouns for Animals ↩︎
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13
PubMed Central. Shared decision-making drives collective movement in wild baboons ↩︎
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PubMed Central. Shared decision-making drives collective movement in wild baboons ↩︎
15
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16
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17
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18
PubMed. The fourth level of social structure in a multi-level society: ecological and social functions of clans in hamadryas baboons ↩︎
19
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20
PubMed Central. Interactive effects of mating receptivity and courtship pheromones on the scent preferences of female red-legged salamanders ↩︎
21
PubMed Central. Interactive effects of mating receptivity and courtship pheromones on the scent preferences of female red-legged salamanders ↩︎
22
Animal Behaviour. Pheromone isoform composition differentially affects female behaviour in the red-legged salamander, Plethodon shermani ↩︎
23
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24
Herpetological Conservation. Breeding Amphibian Population Declines Following Loss of Upland Forest Habitat Around Vernal Pools in Massachusetts, USA ↩︎
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The Bird House. Collective Nouns for Birds ↩︎
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Study.com. What group of animals is called a congress? ↩︎
28
ThoughtCo. The Term for a Group of Baboons: It’s Not a Congress ↩︎
29
Animal Behaviour. Determining the relative importance of dilution and detection for zebra foraging in mixed-species herds ↩︎
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PubMed Central. The group size effect and synchronization of vigilance in the Tibetan wild ass ↩︎
31
Animal Behaviour. Determining the relative importance of dilution and detection for zebra foraging in mixed-species herds ↩︎