"Peacenik" chimps not alwasy so nice

[Moontanman]

Bonobo's hunt too....

 

 

Oct. 14, 2008

They’re sometimes called “hippie chimps”prolific lovers, inhabitants of femaleheaded societies, relatively peaceable toward their neighbors.

 

Except that last part isn’t always true, according to a new study that puts in dent in the “makelovenotwar” image of bonobo chimps. The study’s authors say they’ve seen several cases of wild bonobos hunting down the young of other primate species for food.

 

Bonobos were thought to restrict their modest meat diet to forest antelopes, squirrels, and rodents. That had put them in stark contrast to closely related species such as chimpanzees, where males often band together to hunt and kill monkeys. Humans, too, are closely related to both chimps and bonobos.

 

The unexpected predatory lusts found among bonobos challenge a conventional theory that male dominance and aggression must be causally linked to hunting, said Gottfried Hohmann, one of the study’s authors.

 

It’s “relevant for the discussion about male dominance and bonding, aggression and hunting,” added Hohmann, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

 

“In chimpanzees, male dominance is associated with physical violence, hunting, and meat consumption. By inference, the lack of male dominance and physical violence is often used to explain the relative absence of hunting and meat eating in bonobos.”

 

Bonobos live only in the lowland forest south of the river Congo. Along with chimpanzees, they are humans’ closest evolutionary relatives. Bono*bos are perhaps best known for their promiscuity: sexual acts both within and between the sexes are a common means of greeting, re*solving conflicts, or reconciling after conflicts.

 

Hohmann’s team made its observations while studying a bonobo population living in LuiKotale, Salonga National Park in Congo. The researchers said they saw three cases of successful hunts in which bonobos captured and ate their primate prey, and two failed hunts. Both bonobo sexes seemed to play ac*tive roles the hunts, unlike the case with chimpanzees, according to the scientists.

 

The study appears in the Oct. 14 issue of the re*search journal Current Biology.