5/28/2023 0 Comments Chimpanzee warWith these rare battles now on record, the next question is what could have caused it. The other gorillas escaped, while some chimpanzees were injured in the fighting in the first clash. In both cases the chimpanzees were able to separate an infant gorilla from its mother and kill it – in the second incident the baby gorilla was eaten by the chimps. Here, the chimps came across the gorillas at the start of a territory border patrol. The second interaction in December 2019 involved 27 chimpanzees (some of which were involved in the first incident) and seven gorillas (one silverback, three adult females, one juvenile and two infants), and lasted 79 minutes. The chimps encountered the gorillas on the way back from an excursion into neighboring territories. The first interaction in February 2019 involved 18 chimpanzees and five gorillas (one silverback, three adult females, and one infant), and lasted 52 minutes. "We now want to investigate the factors triggering these surprisingly aggressive interactions." "Our observations provide the first evidence that the presence of chimpanzees can have a lethal impact on gorillas," says primatologist Tobias Deschner from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. In a new study documenting the fighting, researchers are hoping to shed some light on what might be behind the unusual aggression – whether it's to do with territorial battles, competition for resources, or something else. Both times the chimpanzees outnumbered the gorillas and instigated the attacks, and both times an infant gorilla was killed. Two separate encounters were observed in the Loango National Park in Gabon in 2019.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |