“It was a very necessary first step,” said Samuni, a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Pan Lab and the paper’s lead author. The research, published in PNAS, shows that four neighboring groups of bonobos they studied at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo maintained exclusive and stable social and spatial borders between them, showing they are indeed part of distinct social groups that interact regularly and peacefully with each other. A new study led by Harvard primatologists Liran Samuni and Martin Surbeck on the social structure of bonobos may begin to fill in some of the blanks. Some, however, have challenged this because of a lack of detailed data on how these groups work and how they separate themselves. The endangered primates share 99 percent of their DNA with humans and have a reputation for generally being peace-loving and sexually active - researchers jokingly refer to them “hippie apes.” And interactions between their social groups are thought to be much less hostile than among their more violent cousins, the chimpanzees. Scientists believe bonobos might serve as an evolutionary model. Surbeck summarizes: “Our obtained results show how warfare may have a fundamental impact on the structure of a given society.Humans display a capacity for tolerance and cooperation among social groups that is rare in the animal kingdom, our long history of war and political strife notwithstanding. The females of both species cooperate with each other when it comes to raising their young. While chimpanzee males need to cooperate with other males when it comes to activities like border patrolling, territory defense and joint hunting, bonobo males who are much less territorial associate mainly with females, most often their mothers, with whom they cooperate and who help to increase their sons’ mating success. These results can be explained by different forms of cooperation in bonobos and chimpanzees. “In bonobos, males did not prefer to associate with other males and both sexes associated preferentially with females.” “All chimpanzee communities were sexually segregated, meaning that males and females associated more with same sex partners”, says Surbeck. Surbeck and his team have thus compared long-term data from five chimpanzee and two bonobo communities from five different field sites in Ivory Coast, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to study with whom bonobos and chimpanzees preferentially associate. The researchers wanted to know whether these differences in male cooperation against outsiders, also influence their choice of associates. “While chimpanzee males are highly territorial, with hostile and sometimes lethal intergroup encounters, bonobos have rather peaceful relationships between groups and lack lethal violence during encounters”, says Martin Surbeck of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. While bonobos and chimpanzees are similar in many ways, as both species are closely related to each other genetically, they differ in some important behavioral aspects. To increase the benefits of group-living, animals often associate selectively with certain partners and their choice is likely driven by their cooperative needs. Group-living has its benefits, such as the joint defense against predators and better access to food and mates as well as costs, like an increased competition over food and mates or a higher risk of getting a disease from a group mate. © Zanna Clay (LuiKotale Bonobo Research Project)
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