> "Whether this behavior is due to competition for food or to the decline of the rainforest's productivity caused by climate change will now be investigated in more detail."
Declaring the cause must be food competition or climate change seems a bit hasty?
These are complex social animals. Given this is the only attack ever observed, it seems possible to me that there are a myriad of plausible one-off explanations. Perhaps a particular chimp or gorilla was having a really bad day and just went out looking for a fight.
I remember once watching a documentary on a roving band of chimpanzees, and thinking how human they looked. I was shocked when they attacked another band of chimpanzees and killed them all. However, I quickly overcame my shock. They were quite human indeed...
From the videos, it looks like the human observers were about ten meters away.
That made me wonder how risky filming this is.
Google didn’t give me cases of attacks on observers, but it did give me https://observers.france24.com/en/20120926-midst-armed-confl..., so I think those observers are at some risk.
It also taught me chimpanzee wars exist (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229682-600-only-kno...)
Never have I been more disappointed that an article didn’t include video.
There are videos
"At 13:15, Chenge followed by an adult female, Roxy, climbed up the tree. Roxy moved toward Greta and took the body. She then began to consume the hands and internal organs of the gorilla infant. Between 13:16 and 14:00, Roxy allowed Chenge, Littlegrey, Onome, Orian, and Queliba to access small amounts of meat, no begging behaviour was observed between individuals. A final gorilla chest beat was heard at 13:46 in a North-East direction of the observers."
That's pretty gruesome.
That looks like a scene from a Stanley Kubrick movie :)
Direct link?
You can download these with youtube-dl:
https://videocdnvod1-vh.akamaihd.net/i/EDUvKatdP5Y4y5HF1ihek...
https://videocdnvod1-vh.akamaihd.net/i/5PRZ1ghRygZ5tTNMcbrrT...
As a child, I would hear news reports talking about guerrilla attacks. It wasn't until I saw a Mad Magazine feature with a title along the lines of "if only the news meant what it sounded like" with a picture of gorillas attacking a city that I realized that they not gorilla attacks (I think it was a while longer still before I knew the word was guerrilla—I was a kid, OK?). This is the first sign that maybe the world could be as interesting as I imagined.
cool
For videos scroll to the bottom of this page https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-93829-x
Gorilla infants were killed while the adults escaped
Although noteworthy that the chimpanzees scattered and broke down the defenses of Silverbacks, it would be more noteworthy if they took down an adult male
I am surprised silverback gorillas were not capable of protecting their clan.. A full grown gorilla has a 1,300 PSI bite force.
There were 18 chimpanzees vs. 1 silverback. While the silverback was getting harassed by 10 chimpanzees, the gorilla infant could be targetted by the other chimpanzees.
Moreover, the silverback was troubled by the presence of human observers and fled 3 minutes later, whereas the chimpanzees were habituated to the human presence.
Quotes below:
> In both events, the chimpanzees considerably outnumbered the gorillas. [...] At 17:13, the silverback charged an adolescent female chimpanzee, Gia, knocking her into the air. At 17:15, a group of approximately nine male chimpanzees (adults and adolescents), and at least one adult female chimpanzee surrounded the silverback, and repeatedly jumped down on and hit him whilst screaming and barking. [Meanwhile, the gorilla infant could be kidnapped by the other chimpanzees.] At 17:22, one adult male chimpanzee, Littlegrey, was observed sitting on the ground holding a gorilla infant in front of him.
> During the first encounter the silverback was present for 14 min [out of a total of 52 min], whilst in the second encounter the silverback was present for 10 min [out of a total of 74 min]. [...] At 12:33, the silverback discovered the human observers on the ground in a distance of approximately 30 m to the base of the tree and started barking. [...] At 12:36, the silverback rapidly climbed down the tree and fled. The chimpanzees continued barking but did not follow him. [...] We cannot rule out that the presence of human observers, in both events, may have had an effect on the unhabituated silverback’s departure and may have tilted the imbalance of power in favour of the habituated chimpanzees.
If I was one of the researchers, I would be very worried about having been associated with this encounter, the next time I see some gorilla.
On the face of it that does seem surprising. With (vastly) superior numbers and a focus on confusion and harassment though, I can easily imagine a gorilla being unable to fend them off completely.
How us Chimps captured King Kong is beginning to make more sense.
Apes apart weak.
I for one welcome our new chimpanzee overlords.
I think the gorillas are now angry and down voting.
This is how it happened.
At each step of the evolutionary ladder, there is a confrontation from one species to the next; A battle of hairy to slightly less hairy homonids. Two meet on a grassy plain, their stares communicating that this is the final straw. You came into our banana plantation the last time. A thought reverberating through the millenia. Once again, two creatures play out their parts, employing different gifts bestowed upon them by nature, now to challenge eachother in mortal combat. One with a slightly more developed brain, and the other with slightly more developed muscles.
Partially written with GPT-3.
Meta: Any HN threads where 90% of the comments are "jokes" should just be deleted.
Depends if the jokes are good.
no... thanks for trying to censor everything though... you sound like Mods on a bad day.
Deleting a thread on a tech forum with no substantive discussion about great ape behavior is not "censorship" or "censoring everything"
HN is not strictly a tech form. The goal is what’s interesting, the audience is tech focused but the third ranked link is currently:
Lost world revealed by human, Neanderthal relics washed up on North Sea beaches (sciencemag.org) 226 points by chippy 8 hours ago 81 comments
Yesterday’s top 10 had: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2021-07-20
Restaurant workers quit at record rate (npr.org) 434 points by boulos 1 day ago 907 comments
Baltimore Museum of Art will host an exhibition curated by the museum's guards (artbma.org) 415 points by hampelm 1 day ago 139 comments
MAPS Celebrates California Senate Passage of Psychedelic Reform Bill (maps.org) 303 points by pmoriarty 1 day ago | 87 comments
My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (danlawton.substack.com) 480 points by mudita 1 day ago | 539 comments
The comment you responded to responded to the comment it responded to.
To be fair, substantive discussion has emerged and all the tomfoolery has been downvoted. Steady as she goes
It most certainly is censorship done arbitrarily-- the voting system is there to reflect the attitudes and desires of the users.
But let's go further and just delete articles on gorillas and the dangers of mindfulness meditation as well? They have nothing to do with tech, anyways...
> is not "censorship" or "censoring everything"
Actually, that would in fact be a very straightforward example of censorship. Which isn't to say that it would necessarily be a bad thing - moderation involves limited and targeted censorship.
Let's not go redefining words in order to defend a particular course of action. We should argue the actual merits instead.
Agreed. Fun should not be tolerated. This is a serious place for serious discussions and dour faces. I'm frowning as I pound this out on my keyboard.
> The increased food competition may also be caused by the more recent phenomenon of climate change
Way to go, jumping right into speculation, as scientists they shouldn't be so trigger happy, specially given that they go on to say
> We are only at the beginning to understand the effects of competition on interactions between the two great ape species
About time. As a civilization, we desperately need a monolith or two to show up right about now.
Just split the monolith into several smaller repos.
IDK, someone is just going to argue it should be packed back into a monolith over and over. Despite there clearly being no right answer.
Joe Rogan needs to know about this as soon as possible. The guy loves talking about chimps on his show.
A hundred percent
Time for Manning's to release a Natural Selection in Action series.
A modern day analog of the conquest of Neanderthalia by the strange, physically weaker cousins from down under.
Historians will be completely befuddled trying to understand how THIS was the instigating factor for the series of events that lead to WW3.
> In the encounters, which lasted 52 and 79 minutes, the chimpanzees formed coalitions and attacked the gorillas.
Gorillas needs to watch their aggressive expansion. Especially since Chimpanzee tribes are overpowered since Leviathan.
Indeed. Chimps will eat gorilla infants. So if the attack was over a scarcity of food resources you'd expect the killed infant to be eaten. This was only observed in 1/2 the encounters...
> Between 2014 and 2018, we observed nine direct interactions between individuals of the Rekambo community and unhabituated gorillas (N=9; see Fig. 1). These events were always peaceful, and occasionally involved co-feeding in fruiting trees (N=2). In 2019 however, we observed two encounters resulting, in both cases, in coalitionary lethal attacks. The first encounter involved a party of 27 chimpanzees and a group of five gorillas. The second involved a party of 27 chimpanzees and a group of seven gorillas (see Table 1, and video clips 1 and 2 in the SA). The first event occurred after a territorial patrol during which the males made a deep incur- sion into a neighbouring chimpanzee territory. The second event happened at the start of a suspected territorial boundary patrol. Both events took place on the outer boundaries of the Rekambo territory (see Fig. 1). The main aggressors in both events were adult male chimpanzees (for details of involvement see Table 1). The two encounters lasted 52 and 79 min, respectively, involved both contact and non-contact aggressions and coalitionary displays from chimpanzees towards gorillas. The gorillas counter attacked and defended themselves using contact aggressions, displays and threat gestures. During the first encounter the silverback was present for 14 min, whilst in the second encounter the silverback was present for 10 min. The first encounter resulted in one dead gorilla infant and three injured chimpanzees; the second resulted in one dead gorilla infant. While there was no indication of consumption of the dead gorilla infant in the first encounter, the infant in the second encounter was almost entirely consumed by one adult chimpanzee female.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-93829-x.pdf
The non-eating attack resulted in chimpanzee injuries. They very well could have been chased away and/or too busy nursing injuries.
They are not declaring that. The proposed cause is a thesis that will be investigated further and could very well be disproven. I don't see what's wrong with that.
I'm not sure how the thesis could possibly be disproven. Interviews with the apes?
> Perhaps a particular chimp or gorilla was having a really bad day and just went out looking for a fight.
This doesn't necessarily contradict the food competition or climate change hypothesis. To the individual ape it might seem that he's just having a bad day, but then you could look at weather/food data and compare it to incidence of violence and see a causal relation. It would actually be surprising if those things didn't affect ape behavior.
I know many humans who get very grumpy on an empty stomach.
That phrasing struck me as well. It's a classic false-dichotomy. It's funny to me to see it so prominent in what appears to be a fairly professional site.
They've turned climate change into the new boogeyman, which is a shame since it's an important issue.
and why is it an important issue? In part because of the ecological stresses it causes, which results in less supply of resources in a given ecological niche.
Seems entirely reasonable to hypothesise the cause of aggression being related to this. That's not something they tested, merely a proposed hypothesis.
It's a convenient hypothesis, given the ubiquity of climate change impacts, but also a lazy one, like blaming the aggression on something equally as prevalent and relevant to the situation, like chimp genetics. The hypothesis is untestable absent some other specific assertions, and therefore unscientific.
Give it few more weeks of research and they'll blame it on covid.
Makes your wonder why Neanderthals only survived as fragments in our DNA.
If you want public funding in Germany, you better make sure that you cover either diversity or climate change with your research. Not sure how they missed the opportunity to give "lack of group diversity" as a possible reason for the attack.
Does writing off climate change as a factor seem a bit hasty?
Even if it’s just a one-off, terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-day event, one effect of changes in average local weather might be that many individuals are more stressed.