The Bonobo and Conservation

While touring, Green has explored natural areas between venues to better appreciate the importance of preservation and conservation. This has provided him with an education about these important issues.

Bonobos are great ape species characterized by a fission-fusion social structure in which larger communities break off into smaller parties consisting of male, female or mixed individuals.

Social Behavior

Bonobos live in female-led troops with lifelong ties between mother and offspring. According to Harvard primatologists Liran Samuni and Martin Surbeck’s new study, neighboring bonobo groups still maintain social boundaries and hunt or forage separately even though their home ranges overlap by up to 65%.

Experiments conducted with bonobos showing them watching videos revealed that when one group saw someone offering fruit to them from outside their room, when seeing an unfamiliar individual offer fruit in return they dropped it directly in his room to show they wanted to help – perhaps due to bonobos’ superior attention and mentalizing abilities which outshone those of chimps.

Researchers studied groups of captive adolescent and adult bonobos at six European zoological parks: Planckendael in Mechelen, Belgium; Apenheul in Apeldoorn, Netherlands; Twycross Zoo World Primate Centre in Twycross, United Kingdom; Wuppertal Zoo in Germany; Frankfurt Zoo; Wilhelma Zoological and Botanical Garden Stuttgart Germany. Coding each bonobo’s relationships and behaviors revealed similarity with human groups: Bonobos are more likely to engage in cooperative activities with those whom they trust more.

Habitat

Bonobos forage on both land and trees for food, yet spend 35-71% of their time resting. Bonobos often share food among themselves; an act known as altruism.

Bonobos live together in groups known as parties; each male will eventually join one and form strong bonds with its members.

Bonobos communicate in rapid, rapid vocal exchanges. Their bodies convey emotions using hand gestures and faces made with hand gestures to express emotion. Similar to chimpanzees, bonobos build nests out of bent branches which they shape into crooks before sleeping communally at night.

Bonobos require forests with diverse plant and animal communities in which to flourish. Unfortunately, their unique habitat in the Congo Basin is threatened by war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and human encroachment; local communities also hunt them for meat or timber harvesting purposes; thus making their survival increasingly vulnerable. AWF is working alongside partners in order to help create new protected areas specifically dedicated to bonobos.

Diet

The bonobo is one of the most human-like apes, walking quadrupedally while suspending itself from branches or trees to move around. While typically vegetarian, bonobos will occasionally hunt small mammals for sustenance.

Fruit makes up a large part of a bonobo diet; however, leaves, stems, pith, flowers, seeds and more are also eaten by them. Some bonobos have even been known to hunt and consume small animals such as bats, flying squirrels or young duikers (small forest antelopes).

At Lola ya Bonobo, our bonobos receive leafy greens, watermelons, bananas, pineapple, avocados, cucumbers, African pear pears and palm nuts as food sources. In addition, we make low-starch, high-fiber biscuits from bananas, sweet potatoes, turnips carrots yams sesame seeds. They also consume protein balls made from lentils beans bananas squash along with wheat maize or cassava flour as a protein supplement.

Bonobos live in fission-fusion communities in the wild and have been observed forming close ties with members of other parties. Their strong social bonds between group members can help them withstand threats while learning how to forage for food and secure new resources.

Communication

Bonobos live in fission-fusion communities made up of multi-male, multi-female fission-fusion relationships, which vary in size depending on habitat and food availability. Their communities, known as troops, form strong lifelong bonds among themselves that are sensitive to each others’ needs. Sleeping areas consisting of bent tree branches interweaved create nests used as camouflage from larger land predators such as leopards or other big cats.

Bonobo vocalizations provide vital environmental information and express an array of emotions, such as alarm, fear, anger, surprise, satisfaction and joy. Their lexigrams may serve as precursors of our own human language.

At Kanzi’s facility, bonobos can prepare food in specialized kitchens and select DVDs by pressing buttons on a screen, as well as communicating with visitors using pictorial symbols on their shirts and keyboards of pictorial symbols on their sleeves. Bonobos’ communication in nature more closely resembles our own; their dyads regularly engage in participation frameworks and cooperative adjacency pair-like sequences with response temporal relationships closely matching human turn transition during speech – as well as repeat signals or create new ones with both recipients familiar and unfamiliar to themselves.