A study by the Max Planck Institutes of Animal Behavior and Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and the University of Konstanz shows that among wild bonobos it is the females who hunt most. The work was published in Current Biology.
For ten years, the team followed two bonobo communities habituated to human presence at the LuiKotale research site in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and analysed 415 prey captures.
Females were identified as hunters in 60% of recorded hunts and hunted small forest antelopes about three times more often than males. Males and females hunted red colobus monkeys at similar rates, and females hunted whether or not they had infants.
The two communities showed different habits: one mainly hunted ground-dwelling mammals and the other specialised in monkeys. The researchers now want to study how hunting strategies vary between groups and over time.
