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Lethal coalitionary attacks of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) on gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) in the wild - PubMed

  • ️Fri Jan 01 2021

Lethal coalitionary attacks of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) on gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) in the wild

Lara M Southern et al. Sci Rep. 2021.

Abstract

Intraspecies violence, including lethal interactions, is a relatively common phenomenon in mammals. Contrarily, interspecies violence has mainly been investigated in the context of predation and received most research attention in carnivores. Here, we provide the first information of two lethal coalitionary attacks of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) on another hominid species, western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), that occur sympatrically in the Loango National Park in Gabon. In both events, the chimpanzees significantly outnumbered the gorillas and victims were infant gorillas. We discuss these observations in light of the two most widely accepted theoretical explanations for interspecific lethal violence, predation and competition, and combinations of the two-intraguild predation and interspecific killing. Given these events meet conditions proposed to trigger coalitional killing of neighbours in chimpanzees, we also discuss them in light of chimpanzees' intraspecific interactions and territorial nature. Our findings may spur further research into the complexity of interspecies interactions. In addition, they may aid in combining field data from extant models with the Pliocene hominid fossil record to better understand behavioural adaptations and interspecific killing in the hominin lineage.

© 2021. The Author(s).

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1

Map of the study area and location of events. The locations of the two lethal encounters of the 06/02/2019 and the 11/12/2019 are marked with green stars. Nine previous encounters with gorillas (2014–2019) are marked with eight grey circles since two event locations were identical) characterized by peaceful behaviour and, in two cases, co-feeding. The 50% and 75% density isopleth of the home range and travel paths based on tracklog data from the two encounter days are marked in broken grey, solid grey and black lines. The figure was generated in R (version 3.6.3, R Core team,

https://www.R-project.org/

) using the package adehabitatHR.

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