• Chimpanzees kill their alpha male? Rocks and sticks used?

    From Primum Sapienti@21:1/5 to All on Sun Sep 5 00:01:09 2021
    From 2017, recently came across it. Interesting picture.

    https://www.newscientist.com/article/2119677-chimps-beat-up-murder-and-then-cannibalise-their-former-tyrant/

    It was a gruesome scene. The body had severe wounds and was still bleeding despite
    having been lying for a few hours in the hot Senegalese savanna.

    The murder victim, a West African chimpanzee called Foudouko, had been beaten with rocks and sticks, stomped on and then cannibalised by his own community.

    This is one of just nine known cases where a group of chimpanzees has
    killed one
    of their own adult males, as opposed to killing a member of a neighbouring tribe.

    These intragroup killings are rare, but Michael Wilson at the University
    of Minnesota
    says they are a valuable insight into chimp behaviour such as male
    coalition building.

    “Why do these coalitions sometimes succeed, but not very often? It’s at
    the heart of
    this tension between conflict and cooperation, which is central to the
    lives of
    chimpanzees and even to our own,” he says.

    Chimps usually live in groups with more adult females than males, but in
    the group
    with the murder it was the other way round.

    “When you reverse that and have almost two males per every female — that really
    intensifies the competition for reproduction. That seems to be a key
    factor here,”
    says Wilson.
    ...
    Thirteen years ago, Foudouko reigned over one of the chimp clans at the
    Fongoli study
    site, part of the Fongoli Savanna Chimpanzee Project.
    ...


    https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10764-016-9942-9

    Intragroup Lethal Aggression in West African Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus):
    Inferred Killing of a Former Alpha Male at Fongoli, Senegal

    Abstract
    Lethal coalitionary aggression is of significant interest to
    primatologists and
    anthropologists given its pervasiveness in human, but not nonhuman, animal societies. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) provide the largest sample of
    recorded
    lethal coalitionary aggression in nonhuman primates, and most long-term chimpanzee study sites have recorded coalitionary killing of conspecifics. We report an inferred lethal attack by resident males on a former alpha male chimpanzee (P. t. verus) at Fongoli in Senegal. We describe the male’s presence
    in the community, his overthrow, social peripheralization for >5 yr, and
    his attempt
    to rejoin the group as well as circumstances surrounding his death. We report attacks by multiple chimpanzees on his dead body, most frequently by a young adult male and an older female. The latter also cannibalized the body. Coalitionary
    killing is rare among West African chimpanzees compared to the East African chimpanzee (P. t. schweinfurthii). This pattern may relate to differences in population densities, research effort, and subspecies differences in
    biology and
    behavior.

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