CHIMPS VS GORILLAS
In the forests of Central Africa, our closest relatives, chimps and gorillas, appear to have lived in harmony for millennia; now, though, something appears to be going badly wrong. In February 2019, researchers from Osnabrück University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany were observing primates in Gabon’s Loango National Park when they saw more than two dozen chimpanzees carry out an unprovoked attack on a group of five western lowland gorillas that lasted almost an hour and resulted in an infant gorilla being captured and beaten to death by the chimps. While gorillas are much larger than chimps, they are generally placid by nature, and live in smallthe two primates co-exist in the forests and when they do interact, it is peaceful, with members of the two species sometimes foraging, and occasionally playing, together, so this conflict could have been seen as a one-off had it not been repeated later in the year. In December 2019, a second round of hostilities took place, pitting 27 chimps against seven gorillas in a battle that lasted 79 minutes and resulted in the death of another gorilla infant. It remains unclear, though, whether the same group of chimps were involved in both attacks. Researchers fear that this behaviour may reflect a new power balance between the species resulting from a decrease in fruit availability in Loango because of climate change and could be the start of a sustained chimp-gorilla war.
