Washington: The act of sharing something with
another may not be entirely exclusive to humans, as a new
study has found that bonobos, a sister species of chimpanzees,
don`t hesitate to share their food with others.
Researchers, from the Duke University in North Carolina,
who conducted their study on unrelated pairs of hungry bonobos
at Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary in Democratic Republic of Congo,
found that the primates choose to share their food with their
other hungry companions, instead of eating themselves.
For their study, the researchers kept one animal in an
adjacent room and gave food to others. The test subjects had
the opportunity to immediately eat the food or to use a "key"
to open a door to an adjacent empty room or a room that had
another bonobo in it.
The test subjects could easily see into the adjacent
rooms, so they know which one was empty and which was
occupied, the Science Daily reported.
"We found that the test subjects preferred to voluntarily
open the recipient`s door to allow them to share highly
desirable food that they could have easily eaten alone -- with
no signs of aggression, frustration, or change in the speed or
rate of sharing across trials," said lead author Brian Hare.
"This stable sharing pattern was particularly striking
since in other, non-sharing contexts, bonobos are averse to
food loss and adjust to minimize such losses."
Reporting their findings in the Current Biology journal,
the authors pointed out that it is possible that the bonobos
in their study chose to share in order to obtain favours in
the future.
Additional studies are needed to gain further insight into
why bonobos and humans share.
"Given the continued debate about how to characterize the
motivation underlying costly sharing in humans, it will
certainly require future research to probe more precisely what
psychological mechanisms motivate and maintain the preference
we observe here in bonobos for voluntary, costly sharing,"
added Hare.
PTI
