Then, a group of 10 chimps surrounded the silverback “and repeatedly jumped down on and hit him whilst screaming and barking”, Nature stated. The silverback charged and severely injured a female adolescent named Gia. Southern watched a group of 18 chimpanzees encounter five gorillas – a silverback, three females and an infant – in a thicket. “But then, we heard chest beats, a display characteristic for gorillas, and realised that the chimpanzees had encountered a group of five gorillas.” "At first, we only noticed screams of chimpanzees and thought we were observing a typical encounter between individuals of neighbouring chimpanzee communities,” she wrote. Southern observed the first violent attack in 2019. PhD student and lead report author Lara M. Researchers from Osnabruck University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been studying the behaviour of around 45 chimpanzees since 2014.Įach chimp is given a name, and their group composition, hunting behaviour, use of tools, and ability to communicate are carefully documented. The chances of an elephant encountering ripe fruit have decreased by 81% since the 1980s, according to a study published earlier this year.
Other national parks in Gabon have experienced a ‘fruit famine’ in recent years that has upended delicate ecosystems. “It could be that sharing of food resources by chimpanzees, gorillas and forest elephants in the Loango National Park results in increased competition and sometimes even in lethal interactions between the two great ape species,” Tobias Deschner, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and one of the report authors, said. The report authors said more research was necessary to confirm the cause of the deadly attacks.īut they suggest depleted food resources in the Loango National Park, exacerbated by the effects of the climate crisis, could be to blame for growing tensions between the species.
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