I’m picking up on Chad’s Field Notes blog posts, which started with A Laughing Matter, with a study that was recently published involving bonobos, chimpanzees, and a “peanut swing.”
The study is entitled Reassuring body contact promotes social tolerance in bonobos and chimpanzees.
The peanut swing was employed to introduce food opportunities for groups of chimpanzees and bonobos living in sanctuaries in Africa while the researchers recorded instances of friendly touch, or what animal behaviorists call affiliative contact.
Their study aimed to examine whether the chimpanzees and bonobos showed affiliative contact, specifically known reassurance behaviors, in the presence of food competition. They found that there was increased tolerance (i.e. less conflict) in groups that had greater pre-feeding affiliative contact, and noted that affiliative contact was greater between pairs of males in chimpanzees and pairs of females in bonobos. This was predicted because competition is higher among male chimpanzees and female bonobos due to their different species hierarchies.
As I was reading this study, images of pre-party and foraging excitement at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest filled my head and made me smile.
So, the next party video you see, keep an eye out for the chimpanzees’ excitement and view their celebratory hugs and play-bites from a different lens–they are getting ready to compete over food and reassuring each other they mean well.
And think about how humans do the same thing in different ways.
