
Status
Habitat
Range
Group
The great ape where the females hold the power.
Female bonobos are individually smaller than males but coalitionally stronger. Unrelated females bond and back each other, and a male's standing derives largely from his mother's. The result is a society with markedly less lethal aggression than chimpanzees — no observed infanticide, no recorded intercommunity killing.
Their entire world range sits inside the arc of the Congo River, which they cannot cross. Roughly a tenth of that range has formal protection, and much of the rest is unsurveyed forest reachable only by river and foot. Almost everything known about wild bonobos comes from a handful of long-term field sites.
The open shelf
More frames of the bonobo
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