Scientists document how chimpanzees kill gorillas in groups for the first time

A team of German researchers observed how a herd of chimpanzees attacks gorilla families for the first time, leaving a balance of two descendants of the latter species died. The observations took place in the 2019 on expedition to Loango National Park, Gabon, a natural habitat for chimpanzees and an area where several groups of gorillas have been reintroduced into the jungle. According to the same experts, the clashes could be due to the competition for food, caused by the decline in the productivity of the rainforest due to the climate change.

The two chimpanzees like the gorillas they usually exhibit very territorial behavior in their territory, but conflicts and power struggles often occur within the same species. This is why a study carried out by a group of German scientists and published last Monday in the journal was surprising. Scientific reports, Concerning two clashes between a herd of chimpanzees and gorilla families in 2019. Between 2014 and 2018, 9 recordings of collaborations between chimpanzees and gorillas were made to obtain food from fruit trees.

That is why two clashes that resulted in the death of two baby gorillas surprised the specialists, who considered the interactions between these two species as “relaxed”. Among the reasons analyzed by the experts which made chimpanzees and gorillas to fight, there is the decrease in forest productivity due to climate change. The study published last Monday clearly shows that one of the dead gorilla calves he was partially consumed. The herd of chimpanzees devoured the viscera, brain and two limbs.

German biologists and anthropologists who witnessed the clashes reported that they first heard chimpanzee cries, which they attribute to an encounter between two neighboring communities of the same species. But everything changed when they heard an awesome blow to the chest, a characteristic behavior of gorillas. It was then that they saw a group of 27 chimpanzees disturb a a much smaller family of gorillas.

In only one of the clashes, a teenage chimpanzee was injured while no adults were seriously injured in the collisions with gorilla families. “We now want to study the factors that trigger these surprisingly aggressive interactions.“said Tobias Deschner, primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.