The Bonobos: Your Cousins You've Never Met

Annamaria on Monday

Most likely, you have never heard of them.  But it’s important that we learn of their plight.  Hopefully, we will understand enough to inspire us to try to save them, for they are close to disappearing completely.

Allow me to introduce you to this fascinating species:  Relatives of the common chimpanzee (and therefore closely related to us), their official designation is Pan paniscus.  They used to be called pygmy chimpanzees, but now usually bonobos—to make an important distinction between this threatened group and our other, more common great ape cousins.

Bonobos are found only in Central Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  They live in forests south of the Congo River.  Biologists believe that they may have become a distinct species once the river formed about two million years ago and isolated them from their more common relatives up north.

Adult males grow to around four feet, females around three and half.  Gestation is about seven and half months.  They feed on fruit.  They live forty to sixty years in captivity.  No one knows how long in wild.

In the wild they are threatened.  For a bunch of reasons.

One is that, like most threatened species, such as pandas (and totally unlike us humans), they are not fecund reproducers.  Females begin to reproduce at 12 years but they give birth only once every five or six years.  This is not fast enough to grow their current population of fewer than 100,000, especially considering what else is happening to their habitat, only a small portion of which is protected.

The Congo has been unstable politically for more than a decade.   With factional war frequently breaking out, the local population has no motivation to worry about a threatened species.  Deforestation is one killer.  But there are many others: The local populations and the logging company employees depend on bushmeat for their protein.  So bonobos are hunted for food, and also for body parts thought to have magical powers.  That perennial favorite of poachers, sexual drive, for instance.  All I can say about that is, UGH!

Bonobos are worth our concern.

Their plight was brought to my attention by a friend—Sibylle  Westbrook, whom I met at Icelandic Noir a few years ago.   She recounted to me the following experiment into the behaviors of bonobos:

The laboratory contains a group three rooms with locked glass doors.  In one is a bonobo named Semendwa.  In a second Kikwit, Semendwa’s bonobo friend.  They can both see, in the third room, a mound of a favorite food—green apples.  The investigator opens the door so that Semendwa can get at the apples.  But before she touches them, she opens the other door so Kikwit can also eat.   This tells us something about bonobos' attitudes.

But then the experiment is repeated with Semendwa and, not a friend this time, but a bonobo who is a complete stranger to her.  Still, when she gets access to the food, before eating, she opens the door for a hungry stranger so they can both eat.

So you see, bonobos (though they share 98.7% of our DNA) know something that many human beings do not know about altruism.  (Cf. Jeff’s post this past Saturday about the rich EU countries and the poor refugees flooding into Italy, Greece, and Spain.)

In Sibylle’s words, “We cannot afford to let our lesser-known cousins go extinct.  We are too similar and need them to recover what is buried in us.   We might consider ourselves superior in knowledge.  But they know one thing we don’t.  They know how to live in peace."

The African Wildlife Foundation is trying to help.  You can find out more about how you can pitch in here:

http://www.awf.org/wildlife-conservation/bonobo

Addendum:  Sibylle asked me to further explain:

The experiment described above took place at the Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary.  You can find out more about them and how to help here:

http://www.lolayabonobo.org/