What You Need to Know About the Bonobo

Bonobos live in matriarchal communities that forage together, with long-lasting bonds between mother and offspring forming strong ties between generations. Bonobos exhibit many similarities to chimpanzees; however, males acquire their dominance rank through relationships with adult females rather than through birthright dominance.

Like all great apes, bonobos are vulnerable to human activities in their natural habitat. Within TL2 landscape, this means bushmeat hunting as well as deforestation due to logging and agriculture practices that degrade their forests.

Social Behavior

Bonobos resemble infant humans in many respects: they proactively assist unfamiliar conspecifics, are more cooperative than chimpanzees, and volunteer assistance even when there’s no benefit to themselves. Sometimes even helping strangers who seem not need it!

Bonobos exhibit an astonishing degree of empathy and prosocial behavior when kept captive, such as when one bonobo yawns it often causes others to also do. Furthermore, bonobos are more likely to share toys among themselves and groom each other than chimps are.

Research at Lola Zoo and other USA zoos shows that bonobos are highly social, yet also tolerant and cooperative with strangers. Liran Samuni and colleagues found that bonobos exhibited frequent flexible associations with members from various communities as well as frequent tolerant and cooperative interactions between groups – further supporting predictions made in “first impression hypothesis.” They also found evidence supporting bonobos helping individuals lower in social hierarchy than them as expected by “first impression hypothesis.”

Nest Building

Bonobos create a nest-like bed out of leaves and branches to rest their heads at night and to provide shelter from large land predators. When creating this sleeping shelter, living branches are bent inward to form these beds – they remain alive each morning when unbent back into their original positions!

Nest-building skills take around 7 years to develop in the wild, suggesting they are partly learned through trial and error and partly innate. Females seem more adept at this task.

Comparison of data from different sites indicates that bonobos select trees for day and night nests depending on their availability of fruit or terrestrial herbaceous vegetation, size of trunk width (i.e. whether or not the trunk can accommodate them), trunk thickness or other considerations.

Clumped distribution of day and night nests on transects suggests that bonobos maximize access to fruiting “hotspots”. Furthermore, variation in decay rate of bonobo nests across days seems tied to environmental determinants.

Food Preparation

Bonobos consume a range of fruits and vegetables, such as bananas, apples, carrots, turnips and yams; supplemented by leafy clippings from ficus trees and shrubs as well as low-starch foods like hibiscus flowers and sugarcane leaves.

Wild bonobos face two major threats: bushmeat poaching and human interference with their habitat. Civil unrest in the Democratic Republic of Congo has degraded many forests inhabited by bonobos; additionally, local people hunt wildlife both for subsistence consumption as well as profit in the commercial bushmeat trade.

Bonobos live in communities composed of 30 to over 100 individuals that inhabit 22-60 square kilometers (8.5-23 square miles). Bonobos form fission-fusion type social structures where members come and go according to habitat and resource availability; their membership changes frequently depending on habitat conditions and resources availability; they communicate using rapid vocal exchanges as well as hand and face gestures between themselves.

Conflict Resolution

Bonobos have an unconventional method for dealing with conflict – using sexual encounters as a mediator, to form closer social ties and as a form of trade.

Researchers studying bonobos have discovered that many of the same conflict resolution strategies employed by humans have also been taken up by our closest relatives, including being able to detect emotions and respond quickly when threatened. Utilizing the psychological test known as the dot probe task, Samuni and her team discovered that bonobos share many similarities with humans when it comes to emotional recognition; both species pay increased attention when faced with threats compared with neutral conspecifics; also being capable of quickly recognizing defensive emotions in peers quickly enough for rapid responses.

One of the greatest threats to bonobos is habitat loss due to war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and illegal activities, such as logging. Only 28% of their historic range is protected and population numbers continue to decrease – currently, only four bonobo strongholds exist.