Chimps Show ‘Sugar Daddy’ Sex Roles

Male chimpanzees are able to exchange meat for sex with females, a recent study of wild chimps in Côte d’Ivoire found.

Notorious B.I.G.’s “more money more problems” way of thinking may not be true for male chimpanzees looking to mate. It turns out that male chimps who bring home the bacon–so to speak–have twice as much sex over the long term. This, despite meat making up only 1.4% of the diets of wild chimps.

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Researchers Cristina Gomes and Christophe Boesch, who conducted the chimp study in Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire, looked for reasons why sharing meat so greatly improves male chimp’s sexual success. One reason, suggested Gomes, was that by exchanging sex for food females “increased their caloric intake without suffering the energetic costs and potential risk of injury related to hunting.”

The study raises questions about cognizance in non-human animals. “Our findings add to the ever-growing evidence suggesting that chimpanzees can think in the past and the future and that this influences their present behavior,” said Boesch.

It also prompts similar queries into human mating behavior, since chimpanzees are our species closest living relative. “These findings are bound to have an impact on our current knowledge about relationships between men and women,” concluded Gomes, “and similar studies will determine if the direct nutritional benefits that women receive from hunters in human hunter-gatherer societies could also be driving the relationship between reproductive success and good hunting skills.”

Findings from the study, which was led by the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, will be published today in peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.

Get involved: Find out how to help protect chimpanzees at the Jane Goodall Institute.

Photo credit: Graham Racher via Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.

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