Bonobos share food like humans
The act of sharing something with another may not be entirely exclusive to humans, as a new study has found that bonobos, a sister species of chimpanzees, don’t hesitate to share their food with others.
Researchers, from the Duke University in North Carolina, who conducted their study on unrelated pairs of hungry bonobos at Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary in Democratic Republic of Congo, found that the primates choose to share their food with their other hungry companions, instead of eating themselves.
For their study, the researchers kept one animal in an adjacent room and gave food to others. The test subjects had the opportunity to immediately eat the food or to use a “key” to open a door to an adjacent empty room or a room that had another bonobo in it.
The test subjects could easily see into the adjacent rooms, so they know which one was empty and which was occupied.
“We found that the test subjects preferred to voluntarily open the recipient’s door to allow them to share highly desirable food that they could have easily eaten alone — with no signs of aggression, frustration, or change in the speed or rate of sharing across trials,” said lead author Brian Hare.
“This stable sharing pattern was particularly striking since in other, non-sharing contexts, bonobos are averse to food loss and adjust to minimize such losses.”
Reporting their findings in the Current Biology journal, the authors pointed out that it is possible that the bonobos in their study chose to share in order to obtain favours in the future.
Additional studies are needed to gain further insight into why bonobos and humans share.
“Given the continued debate about how to characterize the motivation underlying costly sharing in humans, it will certainly require future research to probe more precisely what psychological mechanisms motivate and maintain the preference we observe here in bonobos for voluntary, costly sharing,” added Hare.
PTI
Views: 266
