![]() ![]() Her sons were the only ones that really didn’t attack the body aggressively,” Pruetz says, adding that Mamadou even tried to wake his old partner.(Image credit: Anup Shah via Getty Images) ![]() The female that cannibalised the body the most, she’s the mother of the top two high-ranking males. These were likely to have been caused by chimps clamping them in their teeth to stretch his arms out and hold him down during the attack, says Pruetz.Īfter his death, the gang continued to abuse Foudouko’s body, throwing rocks and poking it with sticks, breaking its limbs, biting it and eventually eating some of the flesh. Pruetz says Foudouko probably died of internal injuries or bled out from his foot wound.įoudouko also had wounds on his fingers. He also had a large gash in his back and a ripped anus. At dawn, they found Foudouko dead, bleeding profusely from a bite to his right foot. “He was trying to come back in at a high rank, which was ultimately a foolish thing to do on his part.” Going apeĮarly one morning, Pruetz and her team heard loud screams and hoots from the chimps’ nearby sleep nest. “We just happened to have at the time five young males all coming up in the hierarchy and those guys together didn’t want to let Foudouko back in,” says Pruetz. They accepted Foudouko back into the fold, although other members of the group still chased him off periodically. By 2013, Mamadou had regained beta male status and his brother, David, had taken over as alpha. He lived alone on the outskirts of chimp society for years, only being observed by researchers in the field once or twice a year.Ĭhimpanzee groups at Fongoli are fairly isolated, so Foudouko’s only chance of finding a mate was to rejoin the group. In 2007, Mamadou was severely injured and separated from the group for weeks, returning frail and holding a lower rank in the social hierarchy.īecause Foudouko maintained an alliance with his now-weak partner, he was ostracised and then ousted by the others. As alpha male, he was “somewhat of a tyrant”, Pruetz says.įoudouko gained alpha status in his late teens and ruled alongside his right-hand chimp, Mamadou, the group’s beta male. Thirteen years ago, Foudouko reigned over one of the chimp clans at the Fongoli study site, part of the Fongoli Savanna Chimpanzee Project. In Senegal, female chimpanzees are poached to provide infants for the pet trade. She suggests that human influence may have caused this skewed gender ratio that is likely to have been behind this attack. Jill Pruetz at Iowa State University, who has been studying this group of chimpanzees in south-eastern Senegal since 2001, agrees. That seems to be a key factor here,” says Wilson. “When you reverse that and have almost two males per every female - that really intensifies the competition for reproduction. “Why do these coalitions sometimes succeed, but not very often? It’s at the heart of this tension between conflict and cooperation, which is central to the lives of chimpanzees and even to our own,” he says.Ĭhimps usually live in groups with more adult females than males, but in the group with the murder it was the other way round. These intragroup killings are rare, but Michael Wilson at the University of Minnesota says they are a valuable insight into chimp behaviour such as male coalition building. Read more: Gang of chimpanzees kills their alpha male ![]()
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