Anthropologist Maud Mouginot recalls an encounter with bonobos early one morning in 2019 deep in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo that helped revise her impression of them as the peace-loving “hippy apes.” It was still pitch dark in Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, in the center of the country, and she and colleagues were on the trail of one of three resident bonobo groups. Suddenly the calm was shattered by shrieks as one bonobo chased another from the same group in an act of wild aggression. “You can feel the violence,” she recalls. “One is really unhappy, it’s screaming, it’s crying, it’s so scared and the other one’s rushing [toward it].” Bonobos (Pan paniscus), an endangered species of ape found only in the DRC, have a reputation for being far more peaceful than closely related chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). But a new study Mouginot and colleagues have published in the journal Current Biology provides a more nuanced view. It shows that bonobo aggression does exist — they just channel it differently from chimpanzees. A bonobo in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, site of the Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project. The species has earned a reputation for peaceable behavior, but a new study shines a light on aggression in males. Image by Maud Mouginot. Mouginot and colleagues analyzed thousands of hours of observations gathered from following the three bonobo groups in Kokolopori, and two chimpanzee communities in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park, and compared male aggression among both species. Aggressive encounters, though nonlethal, included…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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