For years, no one knew why female chimpanzees prefer to give birth alone.
Chimpanzee births in the wild are rarely spotted by researchers, largely because expectant mothers often take a “maternity leave” from their family unit, hiding away by themselves until their child is born. On December 2, 2014, researchers Hitonaru Nishie and Michio Nakamura witnessed a birth in the Mahale Mountains in Tanzania. For unknown reasons, this mother had not taken her maternity leave; she delivered in front of about 20 other chimps. As Nishie and Nakamura watched, the infant was “snatched immediately after delivery and consequently cannibalized by an adult male,” a sight that led them to argue that cannibalism is the reason a chimpanzee mother often leaves her group before labour begins.
Infants are not the only chimpanzees at risk of being cannibalized. In a Planet Earth segment narrated by David Attenborough, a family of chimps in Africa stage a purposeful attack on nearby enemies: other chimpanzees. When a few of the attackers kill a young chimp from the opposing family, they share and eat the victim’s body, taking their meal into the trees. By attacking the other group, the chimpanzees protect their local food supply—and by eating the slaughtered chimp, no meat goes to waste.
Cannibalism in animals is, of course, different from cannibalism in humans. It is surprisingly common. Even herbivorous animals like hippos scavenge the meat of other hippos if food is scarce, and parents of many species eat their young if they are extremely hungry or anxious. Dead or weak offspring are also easy targets for cannibalism—in a 2009 study of Mexican lance-headed rattlesnakes, 68 percent of the mothers ate all, or part, of their stillborn children.
So if chimpanzees do, from time to time, engage in cannibalism, does that make them cannibals? Not really. Just as other animals don’t (often) survive on cannibalism alone, other chimpanzees are hardly chimps’ primary food source. Most of the time chimps are vegetarian, eating berries, fruits, leaves, and seeds, plus the occasional egg or insect. But being primarily vegetarian doesn’t mean chimpanzees never eat meat. They are known to hunt and kill monkeys. (Though chimps and monkeys are both primates, there are enough differences—including monkeys’ tails, a feature missing in chimps—that it is not identified as cannibalism.) The preferred method of consuming this prey, or at least the juveniles, is by cracking open the skull and eating the brain first. And consuming brains is a food practice for another time.