#chimps

[yeahiwasintheshit]

[scorpio-system]

[apes-in-the-kitchen-sink]

MY FAVOURITE SILLIES!! - Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

The Chimpanzee is a great ape that’s native to the tropics of Africa, ranging from west to east, and can also be found in the savannahs of central and western Africa. They’re known most for their complex history alongside humans, and pioneering studies into what it means to be sentient.

Why are they my favourite?

The front of education!

Chimpanzees have been the pioneers for great ape education in and outside of zoos, and continue to this day to be one of the primary faces of anti-extinction campaigns due to their human-like qualities, allowing even the most stonehearted, cold bastards to sympathize. Hopefully.

Tools, toys, and teachers!

While many primates use tools, not many make toys out of objects from their habitat past throwing things. Adult Chimps will use sticks to fish termites from termite mounds, and others might use rocks to hunt small animals for protein. Baby chimps might use sticks as dolls to play with, or rocks to throw into water to make splashes. This is extremely advanced behavior that is taught to the children of the society by the adults, being passed down often from parents and mentors. This creates different cultures of tool use in different areas of chimpanzee societies, which is fascinating to observe.

IM SUCH A BIG MAN!

Male Chimpanzees will use dominance displays to help establish where they are in the hierarchy of their community over others. And while this is very serious work, and can sometimes be scary, for other chimps, I just think they look like they’re doing parkour a little bit, and it makes it so incredibly funny.

How I fell in love <3

This one is entirely personal, but when I was in college, in my animal behaviour class, I at the time only had a special interest in the Planet of the Apes remake franchise, and that was the reason I chose to do Chimpanzees as my behavioural research study. But through doing this research, I quickly found a love for the animal itself, and found myself deviating to tangents on other apes, as well as going on tangents learning about Chimps themselves. These guys are where it all started for me, and I wouldn’t change that for the world.

[draco737]

You know what this means

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

The Sociology of the Killer Chimps

What a civil war among our closest relatives tells us about human conflict.

Warfare is often understood as a contest between visibly distinct groups. But history shows that the worst conflicts can occur within such groups. Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong oversaw the killing of millions of their own people. The executioners spoke the same languages, ate the same foods and practiced the same religions as their victims. Yet the bloodlust was unrivaled.

This isn’t uniquely human. A new study in Science describes a vicious civil war among our nearest evolutionary relatives: chimpanzees. A community of nearly 200 apes that had lived together, groomed together and raised offspring together slowly fractured into two rival groups. Then one group began killing the other.

The study, led by Aaron Sandel at the University of Texas, draws on 30 years of data from the Ngogo chimpanzee community in Uganda’s Kibale National Park. Ngogo was the largest known group of wild chimpanzees and was the subject of the popular 2023 Netflix docu-series “Chimp Empire.” For two decades, researchers tracked the social networks, movements and family relationships of every ape. The picture that emerged was of a single community with internal clusters, akin to neighborhoods in a city. For years, the chimpanzees had loose subgroups, but individuals moved between them.

Then, in 2015, something shifted. The social ties holding the group together suddenly pulled apart. By 2018 the chimpanzees had formed two separate communities that no longer mixed. After that, the smaller Western group began killing members of the larger Central group. From 2018 to 2024, they killed at least seven adult males and 17 infants from the other group in coordinated attacks. These weren’t strangers. They were former partners in grooming, hunting and territorial patrols.

The chimpanzee civil war challenges a dominant theory about human conflict. A prominent view in political science holds that warfare requires cultural markers such as religion, ethnicity, language and political ideology. This is why civil wars are often explained through the lens of sectarian or ethnic division.

The Ngogo chimpanzees had none of these things. No religion. No ideology. No language differences or ethnic identities. The animals didn’t need ideology to divide. They needed only a change in their network of social ties. As relationships weakened, the perceived cost of harming former allies fell.

The researchers identified several forces that may have tipped the group from unity to fracture. The sheer size of the community, nearly 200 individuals, likely strained the ability of any one chimpanzee to maintain the relationships needed to hold the group together. In 2014, the deaths of several older chimpanzees removed key social connectors. In 2015, a new alpha male took over, a shift that often raises tensions. Then, in 2017, a respiratory epidemic killed 25 chimpanzees, including one who acted as a bridge between the two increasingly separated groups. No single event caused the split, but together they weakened the bonds that held the community together.

One finding deserves special attention. All the lethal attacks were initiated by the smaller group. The researchers suggest that the males’ long-standing internal cohesion within this smaller group, built over years of close association, gave them an effectiveness that outweighed their disadvantage in numbers. Tight bonds made the small group dangerous.

Of course, humans aren’t chimps, and we shouldn’t read too much into this conflict. Still, it does shed light on the commonly held view that if we could only implement the correct ideology, reform institutions or overcome cultural divisions, peace would naturally follow.

The raw materials for collective violence may be built into the social nature we share with our closest relatives. Culture gives human conflict its particular shape and scale. But the engine underneath may be older and simpler than we prefer to believe.

The researchers close their paper by suggesting that “it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace.” The bonds we maintain aren’t merely decorative. Relationships do the work, for good and for ill. And when they fail, the consequences can be lethal.

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[friendtoanimals]

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CSNW GIF

Gif of chimpanzee George at CSNW throwing a carrot at the USDA inspector. He's standing on a tall wooden platform when he stomps his feet and charges across to bounce up and down. boing! boing!