Bullies also exist in the primate world. And to fight back, female bonobos band together, with the older females jumping in to help younger females when males behave too aggressively toward them.
In a study published in the journal Animal Behaviour, Nahoko Tokuyama and Takeshi Furuichi detailed their discovery, saying that they may have uncovered one of the ways by which female bonobos are able to maintain their superior status in their society.
The researchers observed wild bonobos in Wamba in the Democratic Republic of Congo and found that older female bonobos commonly come to the aid of their younger counterparts, sometimes forming partnerships to attack.
Usually, team-ups are formed between relatives in an effort to protect resources from those not part of the group. In bonobos, however, females in a group are rarely relatives because they leave their birth group upon reaching adolescence.
"A major research goal for us was to highlight the dynamics in which coalition-forming happens in non-relative individuals," said Tokuyama.
After four years of observation, the researchers saw that all female groups were formed with the intention of attacking males, usually after a male has acted aggressively toward a female. They also discovered that older females usually win one-on-one battles and females always win over males when they are in alliances.
According to Tokuyama, female bonobos may have evolved with an understanding of the power of alliances to address harassment from male bonobos. In their social hierarchy, young females have lower status than males. But by being protected by older females, they can join a group without having to fear an attack from a male. This also controls aggression in males so the females are able to maintain superiority in their society by banding together.
The researchers observed that older females don't discriminate who they help. As such, a younger female doesn't necessarily need to have a close bond with an older female to get protection.
However, older females are not simply benevolent either. It's a two-way street, it turns out.
As younger females start spending more of their time around older females hoping to get protection, the older females are also able to give their sons more opportunities to mate.
In 2015, another study involving bonobos discovered that the primate is capable of communicating in a manner similar to human infants. Bonobos do these with peeps, or short, high-pitched sounds produced while their mouth is closed. There are different peeps for different situations and can be positive, neutral, or negative depending on what is happening.
