"She didn't really know how to be a chimp,” says Zoë Goldsborough, a doctoral candidate at Utrecht University who spent months observing Moni and her community. Moni, one of the lowest-ranking members of her community at Royal Burgers’ Zoo in the Netherlands, struggled to relate to the other 14 chimps in her enclosure, sometimes staring at chimps she wanted to groom or pulling their hair. Research on captive chimpanzees can also offer some insight into their wild kin’s behaviors. The findings show that “chimp moms still need to get that social interaction and social time-and they do.” Grieving together “It was exactly the opposite of what we were expecting,” Lee says. But chimp moms also took at least as much time as bonobos on high-quality social activities, like grooming and play. Not surprisingly, chimpanzee mothers spent more one-on-one time with their infants-and less time with other chimps-than bonobos. They looked at the amount of time each species spent doing various activities, such as eating, traveling, grooming, and playing. ( Read about Goodall’s experiences with Gombe chimps in her own words.) The researchers then compared those observations with decades of data from chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park. Sean Lee, a postdoctoral scientist at George Washington University, has been rethinking the conventional wisdom about female chimps’ day-to-day lives.įor example, scientists have long thought chimp moms aren’t that social, because they spend so much time with their offspring.īut using larger datasets-and open minds-Lee and colleagues discovered that chimp moms get at least as much quality time with other adults as their famously gregarious cousins, the bonobos.įor a study published earlier this year, Lee and colleagues recorded the behaviors of nursing bonobos in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The study also found that moms play a crucial role in this life transition by defending their sons during conflicts with older males, as well as offering comfort through touch. With chimpanzees, it’s the females that find a new group, which is why a female chimpanzee’s closest relatives are likely to be her own sons.Įven though young males don’t leave their family, they face a tough transition: breaking into the social hierarchy of adult males. It’s also highly uncommon among mammals, as most males leave their birth group when they’ve reached maturity. This kind of lasting relationship between mother and son likely occurs across chimp groups. ( See touching photos of animal moms and babies.) Some had even closer connections: “About a third of adult males are essentially best friends with their mothers,” Reddy says. The male chimps didn’t see their moms as often as they once had, but when their paths crossed, the sons sought out their moms and groomed them for long periods, likely repeating behaviors from their childhoods. Reddy and co-author Aaron Sandel spent three years observing how 29 adolescent and young adult males within the Ngogo chimpanzee community of Uganda’s Kibale National Park interacted with other chimps. Generations of primatologists have documented strong relationships between mothers and their adult sons, but it was only last year that a study showed these attachments aren’t just heartwarming-they’re likely the norm. Here are more discoveries that are changing what we know about chimp moms-and revealing how similar they are to us. There’s something about chimpanzee bonds “that's actually sort of indescribable, just like in human loving relationships,” says Rachna Reddy, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University who has observed the animals in the wild for years. Learning more about their social relationships can bolster efforts to protect the species by helping conservationists understand what factors, such as habitat size, chimp communities need to thrive. ( Read how animal mothers remind us a lot of our own.)ĭue to habitat destruction, hunting, and disease, the great ape’s populations have fallen by at least 70 percent, from about a million in 1900 to between 172,000 and 300,000 today. In recent years, new research has brought chimpanzee motherhood into clearer focus, while also providing valuable information about this endangered species. Though chimp communities-which range from Uganda’s tropical rainforests to Tanzania’s savanna woodlands-are diverse, with their own quirks and behaviors, they all share the same foundation: Powerful bonds between moms and young. Sound familiar? Like human moms, chimpanzees pour immense resources into raising their offspring into healthy adults, which can live up to 40 years in the wild. An intense, time-consuming relationship that lasts more than a decade.
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