Nature
PUBLISHED
A grieving chimpanzee has been carrying around her dead baby for months at a Spanish zoo in a tragic demonstration of the species’ intelligence and social complexity.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Natalia the chimp gave birth to an infant at Bioparc Valencia in early February 2024, but it died just 14 days later.
Although infant mortality is extremely high in chimpanzees, it can prove to be devastating for troops because social ties and group cohesion are so important. The recent death of the infant was all the more concerning as Natalia had lost another infant in 2018.
Over three months have since passed, but Natalia is still holding the carcass of her lost offspring.
“At the moment, the situation remains the same, as she continues to carry the calf. It should be said that it is a natural behavior perfectly documented in this species and other similar ones, even in other mammals such as whales or elephants,” a communications officer at the zoo told IFLScience.
Chimpanzees, our closest living ancestor, are one of the few animals that some believe to have an understanding of mortality. Numerous studies have shown that chimps respond to group members' deaths and exhibit behavior that's reminiscent of mourning.
The behavior seen at Bioparc Valencia has also been reported in the wild. While studying a wild troop of chimps in southeastern Guinea, researchers noticed that two of the mothers, Jire and Vuavua, were carrying the mummified remains of their dead infants.
"Chimpanzees are humans' closest evolutionary relatives, and they have already been shown to resemble us in many of their cognitive functions: they empathize with others, have a sense of fairness, and can cooperate to achieve goals," Dora Biro, the lead study author and behavioral biologist who made the observations, said in a statement from 2010.
"How they perceive death is a fascinating question, and little data exist so far concerning chimpanzees' responses to the passing of familiar or related individuals either in captivity or in the wild. Our observations confirm the existence of an extremely powerful bond between mothers and their offspring which can persist, remarkably, even after the death of the infant, and they further call for efforts to elucidate the extent to which chimpanzees understand and are affected by the death of a close relative or group-mate,” Biro added.
“This would both have implications for our understanding of the evolutionary origins of human perceptions of death and provide insights into the way chimpanzees interpret the world around them," Biro explained.
