NDLI: Altruism in Forest Chimpanzees: The Case of Adoption

Content Provider	PubMed Central
Author	Boesch, Christophe Camille, Bolé Eckhardt, Nadin Boesch, Hedwige
Editor	Santos, Laurie
Abstract	In recent years, extended altruism towards unrelated group members has been proposed to be a unique characteristic of human societies. Support for this proposal seemingly came from experimental studies on captive chimpanzees that showed that individuals were limited in the ways they shared or cooperated with others. This dichotomy between humans and chimpanzees was proposed to indicate an important difference between the two species, and one study concluded that “chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members”. In strong contrast with these captive studies, consistent observations of potentially altruistic behaviors in different populations of wild chimpanzees have been reported in such different domains as food sharing, regular use of coalitions, cooperative hunting and border patrolling. This begs the question of what socio-ecological factors favor the evolution of altruism. Here we report 18 cases of adoption, a highly costly behavior, of orphaned youngsters by group members in Taï forest chimpanzees. Half of the adoptions were done by males and remarkably only one of these proved to be the father. Such adoptions by adults can last for years and thus imply extensive care towards the orphans. These observations reveal that, under the appropriate socio-ecologic conditions, chimpanzees do care for the welfare of other unrelated group members and that altruism is more extensive in wild populations than was suggested by captive studies.
Related Links	http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0008901
Starting Page	8901
File Format	PDF
ISSN	19326203
e-ISSN	19326203
Journal	PLoS ONE
Issue Number	1
Volume Number	5
Language	English
Publisher	Public Library of Science
Publisher Date	2010-01-01
Access Restriction	Open
Rights Holder	Public Library of Science
Subject Keyword	Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all) Agricultural and Biological Sciences(all) Medicine(all) Research in Higher Education
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Multidisciplinary

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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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