Hippy apes caught cannibalising their young
So much for the “hippy chimp”. Bonobos, known for their peaceable ways and casual sex, have been caught in the act of cannibalism.
An account of a group of wild bonobos consuming a dead infant, published last month, is the first report of cannibalism in these animals – making the species the last of the great apes to reveal a taste for the flesh of their own kind.
The account comes from a group of primatologists led by Gottfried Hohmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The team has studied bonobos in the wild at a site in Salonga national park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on hundreds of days since 2002. Few were more eventful than 9 and 10 July, 2008.