The first encounter, lasting for 52 minutes, happened on February 6, 2019, and it occurred after a territorial patrol during which the males made a deep incursion into a neighbouring chimpanzee territory, according to the study.
At the first encounter, when we heard the initial chimpanzee screams, we actually thought our chimps had bumped into another group of chimpanzees, Lara Southern, a PhD student at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and first author of the study, explained in an email. It was only when we heard the first chest beat, a sound which only gorillas make, that we knew something different was about to happen.
A group of 27 chimps attacked five gorillastwo male silverbacks, two adult females, and one infant. The gorillas tried to defend themselves with physical force, intimidating body postures, and threatening gestures, but to no avail. The four adults managed to escape, but the infant, separated from its mother, did not survive. Several chimps were wounded during the battle, including a serious injury endured by an adolescent female.
The second lethal encounter, on December 11, 2019, lasted nearly 80 minutes and was very similar to the first, involving chimps from the same community. In this attack, 27 chimps attacked a group of seven gorillas, leaving yet another infant gorilla dead. In the first encounter, the killed infant was left alone, but the infant in the second encounter was almost entirely consumed by one adult chimpanzee female, the study noted.
In both cases, once the first chimpanzee who saw the gorillas let out an alarm bark or scream, the majority of other group members reacted immediately and joined in, all barking together, noted Southern. The chimpanzees then worked together to single out certain gorillas, and in both events they were able to separate the baby gorillas from their mother.
Jessica Mayhew, a biological anthropologist at Central Washington University, said primates adopt different strategies to navigate both intragroup and intergroup conflict and that chimps and gorillas exhibit very different approaches in this regard.
If you study chimpanzees, you come to expect that any squabble can quickly turn lethal, which is a testament to their excitability but also their incredible speed and power, Mayhew, who wasnt involved in the study, explained in an email. However, having this expectation doesnt make a lethal outcome any easier to witness. Life for a young gorilla is quite dangerousinfant mortality is highand this study again highlights their vulnerability within a group even with a formidable silverback as a dad.
Frightening ---
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