Seasonal Changes in Fruit Production and Party Size of Bonobos at Wamba

Abstract

Intro Paragraph: Because chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have a unique fission-fusion social structure, many researchers have investigated the nature of foraging parties. They have reported that chimpanzees form foraging parties whose size and sex composition change flexibly, and that the sizes of parties may vary according to fluctuations in fruit abundance, the number of estrous females, or both (Wrangham 1977, Ghiglieri 1984, Isabyre-Basuta 1988, Stanford et al. 1994, Boesch 1996, Matsumoto-Oda et al. 1998, Newton-Fisher et al. 2000, Boesch and Boesch-Achermann 2000, Hashimoto et al. 2001). Researchers have also reported that females tend to join mixed-sex parties less frequently than males do, and that this likely occurs because ranging in large mixed-sex parties may not be beneficial to the feeding activities of females (Wrangham 1979, 2000, Janson and Goldsmith 1995, Williams et al. 2002, Reynolds 2005).