The two silverbacks of the two groups and the adult females defended themselves and their offspring. In the encounters, which lasted 52 and 79 minutes, the chimpanzees formed coalitions and attacked the gorillas.

But then, we heard chest beats, a display characteristic for gorillas, and realized that the chimpanzees had encountered a group of five gorillas.' student and first author of the study, recalls the first observation in 2019: 'At first, we only noticed screams of chimpanzees and thought we were observing a typical encounter between individuals of neighboring chimpanzee communities. Credit: LCP, Tobias DeschnerĮncounter between chimpanzees and gorillas We now want to investigate the factors triggering these surprisingly aggressive interactions,' says Tobias Deschner.Īdult male chimpanzee in Loango National Park in Gabon. 'Our observations provide the first evidence that the presence of chimpanzees can have a lethal impact on gorillas. Lethal encounters between the chimpanzees and gorillas have so far never been documented. Our colleagues from Congo even witnessed playful interactions between the two great ape species.' 'We have regularly observed both species interacting peacefully in foraging trees. 'Interactions between chimpanzees and gorillas have so far been considered as relatively relaxed,' says Simone Pika. In Loango, the researchers are observing and analyzing the behavior of around 45 chimpanzees with a special focus on group composition, social relationships, interactions with neighboring groups, hunting behavior, tool use and communicative skills. This park has also been home to the Loango Chimpanzee Project since 2005, led by Tobias Deschner, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and Simone Pika, a gognitive biologist at Osnabrück University. Chimpanzees are common in East and Central Africa and live with gorillas in some areas such as the Loango National Park in Gabon.

Chimpanzee attack gorillas