Posted on 10/15/2008 10:53:13 AM PDT by BGHater
A type of chimpanzee known to use sex for greetings, reconciliations, and favors may not be all about peace, love, and understanding after all.
A new study reveals that some bonobos—one of humankind's closest genetic relatives—hunt and eat other primates.
Groups of the endangered chimpanzee subspecies were observed stalking, chasing, and killing monkeys they later consumed.
Scientists have long known from stool samples that some bonobos eat rodents and small antelopes in their natural forest habitats in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), but many researchers thought this was the extent of their hunting activities.
Gottfried Hohmann and Martin Surbeck, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, thought differently.
"We saw that their relations with neighboring monkeys were frequently hostile and found a black mangabey finger in bonobo feces last year," Hohmann said.
"We did not know if the mangabey had been killed by another predator and then scavenged by the bonobo or if the bonobo had killed the mangabey itself, but this raised our suspicions."
The researchers went on to observe bonobos attacking, killing, and eating monkeys. Their findings were published Monday in the journal Current Biology.
Pacifist to Predator
Six years ago, Hohmann and Surbeck began observing a previously unstudied community of bonobos in the DRC's Salonga National Park.
On five different occasions, the researchers saw traveling bonobos change their direction and silently approach monkeys in nearby trees.
Initially, several of the bonobos in the group would take up positions at tree bases and steadily gaze upward. Then, all at once, the positioned bonobos launched upward to attack the monkeys.
Twice the team saw the bonobos capture, kill, and eat their monkey prey.
"The second I read this, I thought: Oh good, finally!" said primatologist Elizabeth Lonsdorf of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.
"Bonobos being so peaceful never sat well with me," said Lonsdorf, who was not involved with the study.
"We see all species of captive apes, including bonobos, hunting animals, like squirrels, that wander into their enclosures. I was just waiting for something like this to come up," she said.
Primatologist Frans de Waal at Emory University in Atlanta said the research "changes our perception of bonobo social organization."
"This is a milestone finding," said de Waal, who also was not involved with the study.
"Now that actual observations have been made, [it] changes our perception of bonobo social organization," he said.
Female Hunters
The scientists, funded in part by the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration, were intrigued to find that some female bonobos hunt just as well as the males. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)
Among chimpanzees, females rarely hunt and have not been seen taking active roles in hunting parties.
But female bonobos launched themselves up trees and attacked their monkey prey just as effectively as the males, Hohmann and Surbeck reported.
"That females are hunting at all came as a surprise, but a few of them are truly excellent hunters," Hohmann said. "We just did not expect that."
Previous studies have found bonobo communities to engage amicably with monkeys they meet.
Bonobos have been observed "borrowing" baby black-and-white colobus monkeys and playing with them as if they were toys. They have also been seen engaging in grooming behavior with red colobus monkeys.
The Chicago zoo's Lonsdorf said playmates can easily become food if conditions change.
"I've seen adult chimpanzees hunt baboon babies that their offspring were playing with just days earlier," she said. "The same could easily be true of bonobos."
Emory University's de Waal said, "We are seeing in bonobos what happened a few decades ago for chimpanzees: field studies begin to report great variation from population to population."
Me too.
He seems to truly try to do what’s best and he has been pretty respectful of President Bush.
And I like his music.
Good grief, I’m defending Ellen and Bono today. But they don’t annoy me.
WTH!! Sounds like you watch monkey porn or something. TMI!!
Bonobos are constantly being promoted by feminazis as models for human relations. These findings will certainly be a great disappointment to the Fems, unless it is discovered that the bonobos not only hunt monkees, but also have sex with them.
To us maybe but I bet not to male bonobos! I've never seen a female bonobo wearing glasses!
/southpark reference
Well, they've been observed a lot, so that would mean that they do only rarely. Where "it" could be both killing other lessor primates, or fighting other Bonobos.
Humans do a lot more fighting than either Bonobos or Common chimps. Always have, probably always will.
Well, they are chimps, what do they know.
They also are not very picky, sort of like Billy Jeff. Although I'll bet they never need to tell their "partner" to "put some ice on it".
Not as much as chimps... and it took decades to discover chimps fight wars.
No argument about humans fighting more ... I'm just engaging in a bit of mild schadenfreude over the fact that the "peaceful bonobo" theory has taken a hit. It's always seemed to me to be more an expression of fuzzy political hopes, rather than a result of scientific judgment.
sorry, bro. FWIW, chimps have also been observed attacking other clans and eating their vanquished foes.
Yeah, well, it’s a jungle out there...
I can attest that the bonobos in our local zoo are definitely the ‘loving’ ones!
I was a zoo volunteer a number of years ago and Jane Goodall came to speak. She was really bummed out because she had recently observed “tribal” warfare among the chimpanzees she had been studying for years and was surprised and dismayed.
“Nature, red in tooth and claw” - Tennyson, so those looking for the idyllic there are eventually gonna be disappointed.
you can be as nice as you want, but when it's between dieing of starvation or invading another tribe, it's time to go to war no matter what species you are.
I do research with Bonobos, but they’re confined to the Columbus zoo. Never saw any cannibalism from them. But if they got hungry enough...
A zoo animal gets his 3 squares. A wild animal has to fend for himself. Whatever doesn’t eat me first gets eaten..........
It's Mr. Peepers in the Witness Protection Program.
Or...some other human-like males. ;-)
What makes it interesting to me is the idealizing of the chimps - she came to believe that humans should be more like chimpanzees (since they are non-violent and form families and social groups that work cooperatively together).
Guess humans shouldn’t be using chimps as our shining example.
And there is a big difference in behavior between wild and captive animals. The Bonobos I work with are tame because they're lazy, and they're lazy because they can be without any risk.
only a couple percent of humans are truly off the proverbial reservation.
goodall meant well and chimps truly are an amazing species, but she found out they were not what was in her idealized mind.
to her credit, she did report what she saw.
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