Intra-community infanticide in wild, eastern chimpanzees : a 24 year review
Abstract
Infanticide is well documented in chimpanzees and various hypotheses have been proposed to explain this behaviour. However, since infanticide by chimpanzees is relatively rare, it has thus far not been possible to thoroughly test these hypotheses. Here we present an analysis of the largest dataset of infanticides from a single community of chimpanzees, a full record of all intra-community infanticides and failed attempts at infanticide over a 24-year period for the Sonso community of chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest, Uganda. We use these data to test four hypotheses for this behaviour: sexual selection, resource competition, meat acquisition and male mating competition. There were 33 attacks on 30 victims, 11 of which were ‘definite’ infanticides, four of which ‘almost certain’, and nine were ‘suspected’, while nine were ‘attempted’ infanticides. The majority of attacks where the perpetrators were known (23) had only male attackers and victims were disproportionally young (2/3 of victims with known ages were under one week old). Our data best support the sexual selection hypothesis for infanticide. Cannibalism was infrequent and partial, suggesting meat acquisition was a by-product of infanticide, and there was no evidence to suggest that infanticide was part of a male strategy to eliminate future competitors. Infanticide by females was rare, but we suggest sexual selection, operating through intra-sexual competition, may also be responsible for infanticide by females.
Citation
Lowe , A E , Hobaiter , C , Asiimwe , C , Zuberbuhler , K & Newton-Fisher , N E 2019 , ' Intra-community infanticide in wild, eastern chimpanzees : a 24 year review ' , Primates , vol. First Online . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-019-00730-3
Publication
Primates
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0032-8332Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
AEL was supported by a University of Kent 50th Anniversary scholarship.Collections
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