What are bonobos?
The bonobo is a species of great ape and part of the Hominidae family. There are eight extant (living) species, consisting of the bonobo, the closely related chimpanzee, two species of gorilla, three species of orangutan, and humans.
Where are bonobos found?
Bonobos are found only within the Congo Basin in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa.
What is the difference between a chimp and a bonobo?
Visually and genetically there isn’t much between the two great apes. Chimpanzees and bonobos share approximately 99.6% of their DNA and can be hard to tell apart. In fact, bonobos were once thought to be merely smaller versions, and called pygmy chimpanzees.
To the trained eye, bonobos are more graceful and slender, with differently shaped and coloured faces. You are also more likely to see them walking on two legs.
However, it is in their social systems that you really see divergence. Rather than having a strict male hierarchy like chimps, they are a matriarchal society: the girls very much rule the bonobo world. Groups are generally led by an alpha female, females almost always have a higher social standing than males, and males derive their status from that of their mother.
Bonobos are also much more sexual, using ‘sexual contact’ to greet friends, de-escalate conflicts and cement relationships. They are the apes who make love not war!
Q&A answered by Leoma Williams.
Web exclusive: Bonobos cause issues for the crew – Monkey Planet – BBC One
What’s the scientific name of the bonobo?
The scientific name of the bonobo is Pan paniscus.
It is one of only two species in the genus Pan, the other being the chimpanzee (P. troglodytes).
Do bonobos help each other?
Unlike chimpanzees, bonobos are “prosocial” – they will help a complete stranger in need.
Humans are usually only too happy to help – even complete strangers, and even to our own inconvenience. Chimps aren’t. Chimps rarely tolerate the presence of strangers, let alone go out of their way for them. But their closest cousins, bonobos, are more like us, according to new research.
Experiments conducted at Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo show that bonobos are willing to put themselves out to help strangers gain access to food even though they get none of it for themselves.
The researchers hung a piece of fruit from a rope in one room that could only be released from an adjacent room, separated by a fence. Bonobos in the second room would make considerable efforts to release the food for an unfamiliar individual in the first room.
“They gave up playing-time, walked across the room, climbed up, held their body with one arm and reached through narrow mesh to help with the other arm,” says Jingzhi Tan of Duke University, USA. “In return they had no immediate selfish benefits.”
Such “prosocial” behaviour sits well with the image of bonobos as peace-loving egalitarians. Chimps are far less socially spirited. Tan says that they behave so aggressively to strangers that it’s not even possible to perform these experiments on them.
Bonobos seem to play a longer game, which involves making a good first impression. “All relationships start between two strangers,” says Tan. “But you may meet them again, and this individual could become your future friend or ally. You want to be nice to someone who’s going to be important for you.
“Human cooperative behaviour is still much more flexible, more risky, more complicated and at a larger scale,” Tan told BBC Wildlife. “But we have more similarities with our great ape cousins than we previously thought, in terms of our prosocial predispositions.”
Does bonobo society affect paternity?
Bonobos are famous for their gentle, free-loving, egalitarian ways. Even so, some bonobos are more equal than others.
Research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has revealed that a few privileged males father a large proportion of all the offspring born in their community.
In chimpanzee society, males are dominant to females and often bully them into mating.
Among bonobos, though, it is the females that are socially dominant. Free from the threat of aggression, they can mate with whoever they like. This might be expected to spread paternity rather evenly amongst the males, especially as females make close friendships with different males.
But if anything, the skew is even greater in bonobos than in chimps.
That seems to be because females tend to have similar tastes in a mate – the male at the top of the male hierarchy.
“The funny thing under such a scenario would be that most of the females would have the same preference for Camillo, the alpha male and ‘Brad Pitt’ of the bonobos at our research site,” says Martin Surbeck from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who led the work.
Can bonobos use tools?
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Whilst chimpanzees fashion implements from wood and stone to crack nuts and fish for termites, wild bonobos don’t go far beyond using leaves to keep the rain off.
The difference is not because the bonobos lack opportunities. As highly sociable foragers, they have every chance of learning techniques from others. And there are plenty of termite mounds around to fish from, but bonobos walk right past them. I found that bonobos are intrinsically less motivated for tool use. Young chimps spend far more time manipulating and playing with objects.
But does this mean that chimpanzees are more intelligent? Bonobos can use tools to obtain food in captivity. But we think there’s a trade-off between social attention and motivation to use tools. Japanese researchers equipped with eye-tracking technology have just found that while bonobos focus on the socially important elements of a scene – eyes, for example – chimps are more interested in the objects others carry.
Humans manage to do both. We use tools for everything and we are socially sophisticated. Perhaps our huge brains spare us from sacrificing one skill for the other, so we can be great at both.
Scientist Kathelijne Koops spoke to BBC Wildlife about her research into bonobo tool use.
Are bonobos ticklish?
Bonobos are respond to being tickling, with a noise that sounds a lot of like human laughter. And they’re not the only ticklish animals – all great apes respond to tickling with a laughter-like noise, and other animals seem to enjoy being tickled too.
Bonobo Loves Being Tickled | Animals In Love | BBC Earth
What is the bonobo truffle?
Although it sounds like a great 1920s dance, this is actually a species of fungi.
Truffles may not be to everyone’s taste, but these subterranean fungi are totally reliant on being eaten, if their spores are to be spread. This new species apparently appeals to the sophisticated palates of bonobos, who use their hands to dig them out of the earth.
Hysterangium bonobo, as it has been formally named, was identified at Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but the species was already known to the local human population, who call it simbokilo and use it to bait traps for duikers, porcupines and other mammals.
Read the paper in Mycologia.
Are there any sanctuaries for bonobos?
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Lola ya Bonobo is the world’s only bonobo sanctuary. Located in a beautiful sprawling forest just outside Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it is not just the ‘Paradise of Bonobos’ (as its name means in Lingala) but a valuable conservation resource. Thousands of Congolese people, most of them children, visit Lola every year.
Visitors learn that bonobos are an Endangered Species, and that it is illegal to hunt or capture them. When bonobos are rescued from the bushmeat trade, they’re brought to Lola. Some are subsequently released into the wild.
Main image: Bonobo mature male calling. Lola Ya Bonobo Santuary, Democratic Republic of Congo. © Anup Shah/getty