Bonobos have a well-earned reputation as the hippies of the great apes. Not only do they practice free love, using sex to bond socially, the more matriarchal species are also generally more cooperative and less violent than their patriarchal chimpanzee relatives.
These different evolutionary pathways were most likely carved by the Congo River around 1.5 to 2 million years ago and are rooted in their diets. Unlike bonobos, chimps north of the river shared their territory with gorillas and competed with them for fruit, forcing them to adopt an omnivorous diet that relied on hunting. Their close relatives south of the river lived in a gorilla-free territory, allowing female bonobos to form social foraging groups that gathered fruit. But they do still hunt, and according to a new study published in Current Biology, females shoulder most of that burden.
Read more: “How Female Bonobos Rule”
Primatologists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior followed two communities of bonobos at the LuiKotale field site in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, cataloging 415 prey captures during the decade-long study period. The team only analyzed captures in which the hunter could be identified, ignoring the odd bonobos who showed up with mystery meat of unknown origins.
They found that female hunters accounted for 60 percent of successful captures. “They were the initiators of the hunts,” study author Mattia Bessone of the University of Konstanz in Germany said in a statement. “They were not opportunistically stealing prey from males.”
Remarkably, motherhood didn’t seem to dissuade the bonobos from hunting—even while they were carrying their infants. The most dangerous game—arboreal monkeys capable of fighting back, like the red colobus—were hunted by male and female bonobos equally. “Young females tear through the treetops to chase monkeys who fight back in defense,” Bessone said. “This is a seriously dangerous business.”
Chasing down squirrelly quarry like the colobus did seem to be a younger bonobo’s game, however. The team found that older females tended to stick closer to the ground, hunting down small ungulates like antelopes. And they particularly excelled at downing terrestrial prey, accounting for three times as many successful hunts as their male counterparts.
This unequal division of labor helped cement a dominant role for females, like it does for male chimpanzees. Once they felled their prey they were also able to keep it for themselves, deciding who got to share in the bounty. “Catching prey is one thing but maintaining control of the carcass is another one,” study author Gottfried Hohmann of the Max Planck Institute explained. “It’s possible that males are not capturing large prey in order to avoid conflicts with females over meat.”
In the bonobo world, some women really can have it all.
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Lead Image: Victor Ammann
