When competition for food is high, both chimps and bonobos sometimes rub their genitals together to cope
By Chris Simms
5 March 2025
Male chimpanzees sometimes make sexual contact in stressful times
Jake Brooker/ Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust
Some chimpanzees seem to use sexual behaviour like genital rubbing to manage stressful situations, which shows they aren’t as different from hypersexual bonobos – our other closest living ape relatives – or, indeed, people as we thought.
Jake Brooker at Durham University, UK, and his colleagues have investigated the sexual behaviour of non-human primates at the Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust in Zambia. Both sanctuaries include a mix of wild and captive-born apes that can roam and forage freely within them.
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The researchers observed 53 bonobos across three groups at Lola ya Bonobo and 75 chimpanzees across two groups at Chimfunshi in the course of feeding events that involved a swing distributing a limited supply of peanuts over a particular area.
“Bonobos and chimpanzees both live in very complex social structures with very rich social interactions that they have to navigate on a daily basis,” says team member Zanna Clay, also at Durham University. Anticipating such feeding events can be stressful because of competition over who gets to the food first.
The researchers observed 107 instances of genital contact in the bonobos and 201 in the chimpanzees in the 5 minutes before 45 feeding events across the five groups.