Surprising: this is how chimpanzees kill gorillas in groups | the Chronicle

A team of German researchers observed for the first time how a herd of chimpanzees attacked gorilla families. The confrontation had a tragic outcome, leaving a balance of two descendants of the latter species died.

The events occurred in 2019 during an expedition to Loango National Park, Gabon, a natural habitat for chimpanzees and an area home to several groups of gorillas reintroduced to the jungle. According to experts, the clashes could be due to competition for food, since there was one low productivity of the rainforest due to climate change.

Chimpanzees and gorillas tend to exhibit very territorial behaviors, to the point that power and leadership struggles often take place within the same species. This is why a study carried out by a group of German scientists and published last Monday in the journal Scientific Reports was surprising. two clashes between a herd of chimpanzees and gorilla families.

The episode surprised scientists because between 2014 and 2018, nine records of collaborations between the two species were recorded to obtain food from fruit trees. “Our colleagues in the Congo have even witnessed funny interactions between the two species of great apes,” he claimed Simone pika, gognitive biologist at the University of Osnabrück.

Until now, specialists considered the interactions between them as “relaxed“The published study clearly indicates that one of the two dead gorilla calves were partially eaten: the herd of chimpanzees devoured the viscera, the brain and two limbs.

How did the attacks on the gorillas go?

German biologists and anthropologists eyewitnesses to the clashes reported first hearing cries of chimpanzees, which they attributed to an encounter between two neighboring communities of the same species. But that all changed when they heard an impressive blow to the chest, a behavior characteristic of gorillas. It was then that they turned ton group of 27 chimpanzees teasing a family of gorillas, much less numerous.

In the encounters, which lasted 52 and 79 minutes, the chimpanzees formed groups and attacked the gorillas. The two males of both groups and the adult females defended themselves as well as their young. All mature specimens managed to escape, but two baby gorillas were separated from their mothers and killed.

Meanwhile, only in one of the confrontations a teenage chimpanzee was injured while no adult was seriously injured.

“Now we want to study the factors that trigger these surprisingly aggressive interactions.”, insured Tobias Deschner, primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The authors of the study suggest several explanations for the observed interspecies violence, including hunting and food competition between species: “It could be that the fact that chimpanzees, gorillas and forest elephants share food resources in Loango National Park causes more competition even in the lethal interactions between the two great ape speciesDeschner explained.