Hippy apes caught cannibalising their young
Magazine issue 2746.
So much for the "hippy chimp". Bonobos, known for their peaceable ways and casual sex, have been caught in the act of cannibalism.
An account of a group of wild bonobos consuming a dead infant, published last month, is the first report of cannibalism in these animals – making the species the last of the great apes to reveal a taste for the flesh of their own kind.
The account comes from a group of primatologists led by Gottfried Hohmannof the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The team has studied bonobos in the wild at a site in Salonga national park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on hundreds of days since 2002. Few were more eventful than 9 and 10 July, 2008.
Early on the morning of 9 July, Andrew Fowler spotted an ape known as Olga with her two daughters: 5 or 6-year-old Ophelia, and Olivia, who was three years her junior. "By 8 o'clock Olivia was dead," says Fowler. She showed no obvious traces of blood or bruises, so it seems unlikely she had been killed by other members of her group.
Decomposing corpse
Fowler's team lost sight of the apes not long afterwards, but early the following day he saw Olga join them carrying Olivia's body, which had already begun to decompose. "It was smelling, limp and wet," he recalls. Olga and seven others spent the rest of the day devouring the corpse.
"We've never seen anything like this," says Vanessa Woods at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who studies semi-captive bonobos at a reserve. "The last time I saw an infant die, the mother held onto it for days and the keepers had trouble taking the body away."
Though bonobos mostly eat fruit and leaves, they are known to hunt monkeys and the small antelopes called duikers. But Fowler noted signs that this meal was somehow different. More individuals got a taste of the infant than is typical when the apes share meat. They also spent 7½ hours eating the body – longer than they take over a similar-sized monkey. Some even played with it. "If they just think of it as another piece of meat, why do they behave differently with it?" he asks.
An account of a group of wild bonobos consuming a dead infant, published last month, is the first report of cannibalism in these animals – making the species the last of the great apes to reveal a taste for the flesh of their own kind.
The account comes from a group of primatologists led by Gottfried Hohmannof the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The team has studied bonobos in the wild at a site in Salonga national park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on hundreds of days since 2002. Few were more eventful than 9 and 10 July, 2008.
Early on the morning of 9 July, Andrew Fowler spotted an ape known as Olga with her two daughters: 5 or 6-year-old Ophelia, and Olivia, who was three years her junior. "By 8 o'clock Olivia was dead," says Fowler. She showed no obvious traces of blood or bruises, so it seems unlikely she had been killed by other members of her group.
Olivia (pictured middle) died shortly after this photo was taken (Image: Caroline Deimel, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)
Fowler's team lost sight of the apes not long afterwards, but early the following day he saw Olga join them carrying Olivia's body, which had already begun to decompose. "It was smelling, limp and wet," he recalls. Olga and seven others spent the rest of the day devouring the corpse.
"We've never seen anything like this," says Vanessa Woods at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who studies semi-captive bonobos at a reserve. "The last time I saw an infant die, the mother held onto it for days and the keepers had trouble taking the body away."
Though bonobos mostly eat fruit and leaves, they are known to hunt monkeys and the small antelopes called duikers. But Fowler noted signs that this meal was somehow different. More individuals got a taste of the infant than is typical when the apes share meat. They also spent 7½ hours eating the body – longer than they take over a similar-sized monkey. Some even played with it. "If they just think of it as another piece of meat, why do they behave differently with it?" he asks.
...
Read more here/Leia mais aqui: New Scientist
