Primatology.net

Also in the latest Current Biology and first shared by John Hawks is news that may shakeup what you understood was unique to bonobo behavior, that they didn’t hunt other primates. We know that some bonobos eat rodents and small antelopes, albeit infrequently, but for quite sometime we assumed they didn’t consume other primates because they seemed to be placid maternally structured social beings.

The title of the new paper spills all the beans, “Primate hunting by bonobos at LuiKotale, Salonga National Park.” As I just mentioned, bonobos have been popularized by many to be a peace loving species, particularly because of the lack of male dominated social system and far less documented occurrences of physical violence. Such observations have often been used to explain the relative absence of hunting and meat eating in bonobos. In the words of New Yorker writer Ian Parker, bonobos are [were],

“equal parts dolphin, Dalai Lama, and Warren Beatty,”

But earlier this year we got a glimpse into the more devious carnivorous behavior of bonobos, when one of the co-authors of the current paper, Gottfried Hohmann, and another research published in Folia Primatologica, “New Records on Prey Capture and Meat Eating by Bonobos at Lui Kotale, Salonga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo,” their observations of the presence of monkey finger bones in bonobo fecal samples. In the new Current Biology paper Hohmann and Martin Surbeck publish their observations of bonobos hunting diurnal, arboreal and group living primates at LuiKotale in the Salonga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo.

The following table from the paper summarizes their observations:

Table 1: Bonobo Monkey Hunts at LuiKotale

The results show us that there were 5 attempts, and 2 of the 3 successful hunts were made by females. Among chimpanzees, females have been rarely been seen taking an active part in hunting parties. But these two female bonobos rocketed up into the trees and attacked their monkey prey just as effectively as the males. I share Frans de Waal‘s opinion that this study is a milestone piece and changes our very foundation of bonobo social organization and socio-ecology.

But hunting may not be a ubiquitous behavior among all bonobos. As Hawks points out,

“at other field sites the bonobos interact in different ways with monkey species, ranging to mutual grooming.”

In fact, bonobos have been observed playing with baby black-and-white colobus monkeys and been seen engaging in grooming behavior with red colobus monkeys, much like adult chimpanzees hunting baboon babies that their offspring were playing with just days earlier. Bipolar anyone?

Surbeck M, Hohmann G. 2008. Primate hunting by bonobos at LuiKotale, Salonga National Park. Current Biology 18, R906-R907. DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2008.08.040

The following video is a bit dated, it’s from 2004… but still I’m sharing it with you because it is very informative and rare. The video is of  Susan Savage-Rumbaugh’s TED talk, in which she presents human traits and behaviors in bonobos, specifically the bonobo that made her famous, Kanzi.

It seems like the news hasn’t gobbled up this news as adamantly as it did the news of the bonobo reserve in the Congo, but it is nonetheless newsworthy and crucial to the study of bonobos. The Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute put out a press release that they just acquired a second Genome Sequencer FLX (GS FLX) System from 454. Svante Pääbo, director of the department, plans to put this one to use in sequencing the bonobo genome.

I’ve seen two of these 454 devices in person, over at the JGI. These things are gnarly, and cost a lot of money. I was told that each time you wanna use one of the machines, the reagents alone cost thousands of dollars. I didn’t ask to see a purchase order or anything, but I believe them. These devices do big science, they sequence small fragments of DNA and help on constructing it and they do it well.

You maybe asking, “What good does a bonobo genome do for us? We got chimpanzee, macaque, human… and we’re getting Neandertal, gorilla, and gibbon!” Well exactly that, the more primate genomes we have the more information we can get when we compare the genomes to one another. For example, between the bonobo, chimp, Neandertal, and human genomes we can screen to see what genes are specific to modern humans and what genes are specific to chimpanzees. This is critical in understanding what makes us all different, since it is proposed we share so much together.

In related news, I’m happy to announce that the Sankuru Nature Reserve a 11,803 square miles will be created through a partnership involving American and Congolese conservation groups and government agencies to help preserve bonobos. Lots of press has covered this news, for example here’s the New York Times coverage. As you may know all great apes are severly threatened if not endangered.

Vannessa Woods just broke some awesome news of bonobos using tools. From her blog, Bonobo Handshake,

“The bonobos at Lola use tools. It’s really amazing because no one’s seen tool use in bonobos in the wild before (I don’t think).And everyone’s always going on about chimps using tools and how it’s so amazing because everyone used to think that’s what makes us human, and now bonobos use tools too.

Tool using is important because we think that’s how early humans got their start. We couldn’t run fast like a cheetah, and we weren’t strong like mammoths, so we started using tools like spears to hunt meat and rocks to open nuts. These days we use tools like crazy. In fact, we can’t do anything without tools. But looking at chimps, and now the Lola bonobos, we can catch a glimpse of how it all started.”

Jump on over to the post to see the video of one of the bonobos using a rock to hammer open some nuts.