There are fewer opportunities to study bonobos in the wild than chimpanzees, and it is impossible to tell from this one observation whether cannibalism is a regular feature of their behaviour. “It may be that bonobos are craving animal proteins and fats more than we realise.” “It’s perfectly normal that you would eat the meat that’s available, even if it’s in the form of a dead infant.”įrans de Waal at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, agrees. “If you eat meat and you can see as a reasonably large piece of meat, you may as well eat it,” he says. Needing nourishmentįowler warns against over-interpreting the event, and reckons that the need for nourishment was the animals’ main driver. “If they just think of it as another piece of meat, why do they behave differently with it?” he asks. They also spent 7½ hours eating the body – longer than they take over a similar-sized monkey. More individuals got a taste of the infant than is typical when the apes share meat. But Fowler noted signs that this meal was somehow different. Though bonobos mostly eat fruit and leaves, they are known to hunt monkeys and the small antelopes called duikers. ![]() “The last time I saw an infant die, the mother held onto it for days and the keepers had trouble taking the body away.” “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. Olga and seven others spent the rest of the day devouring the corpse. ![]() “It was smelling, limp and wet,” he recalls. Decomposing corpseįowler’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. She showed no obvious traces of blood or bruises, so it seems unlikely she had been killed by other members of her group. ![]() “By 8 o’clock Olivia was dead,” says Fowler. 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.
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