Two wild female bonobos adopted infants from a different social group at Wamba.

ABSTRACT: Adoption, the act of taking another individual's offspring and treating it as one's own, is rare but widely observed in various mammal species and may increase the survival of adoptees. Adoption may also benefit adoptive mothers, for example they might care for close kin to gain indirect fitness or to learn caregiving behaviours. Here, we report two cases of a wild bonobo adopting an infant from a different social group, the first report of cross-group adoption in great apes. In one case, the adoptive mother was already a mother of two dependent offspring. In the other case, the adoptive mother was an old parous female whose own offspring had already emigrated into a different social group. The adoptive mothers provided various maternal care to the adoptees, such as carrying, grooming, nur

SUBMITTER: Tokuyama N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7973529 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature