Mothers stick together: how the death of an infant affects female social relationships in a group of wild bonobos (Pan paniscus).

ABSTRACT: Sociality is widespread among group-living primates and is beneficial in many ways. Sociality amongst female bonobos (Pan paniscus) has been proposed to have evolved as a female counterstrategy to male infanticide and sexual coercion. In male-philopatric bonobo societies, females mostly form relationships with unrelated females. Among these social relationships, it has been proposed that females with infants (also referred to as mothers) tend to have strong relationships with each other (mother-bonding hypothesis). In this paper, we use the case of an infant death in a group of wild bonobos in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, Democratic Republic of Congo, to test this hypothesis. By using dyadic sociality indices for grooming, proximity, and aggression, we investigated whether the infant dea

SUBMITTER: Cheng L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9273548 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature