ArticleScientific reports2021
Two wild female bonobos adopted infants from a different social group at Wamba.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Adoption of 5- and 12-month-old infants by infantless, multiparous females in the Katsuyama free-ranging, provisioned group of Japanese macaques.Primates; journal of primatology · 2026Article
- The Evolutionary-Ecological Basis of Xenophilia.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- A lethal incident during an intergroup encounter in bonobos.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Close encounters of the friendly kind: pacific between-group interactions in primates.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Adoptions of unrelated infants in wild Taihangshan macaques (Current zoology · 2025Article
- A Unique Case of Adoption in Golden Snub-Nosed Monkeys.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Behavioral adaptation in an adoptive free-ranging female Tibetan macaque.Primates; journal of primatology · 2023Article
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Why help others? Insights from rodent to human early childhood research.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Review
- Infant adoptions in wild bonnet macaques (Macaca radiata).Primates; journal of primatology · 2022Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Adoption, the act of taking another individual's offspring and treating it as one's own, is rare but widely observed in various mammal species and may increase the survival of adoptees. Adoption may also benefit adoptive mothers, for example they might care for close kin to gain indirect fitness or to learn caregiving behaviours. Here, we report two cases of a wild bonobo adopting an infant from a different social group, the first report of cross-group adoption in great apes. In one case, the adoptive mother was already a mother of two dependent offspring. In the other case, the adoptive mother was an old parous female whose own offspring had already emigrated into a different social group. The adoptive mothers provided various maternal care to the adoptees, such as carrying, grooming, nursing, and sharing food. No aggression was observed by group members towards the out-group adoptees. In both cases, adoptees had no maternal kin-relationship with their adoptive mothers. Both adoptive mothers already had experience of rearing their own offspring. Instead, these cases of adoption may have been driven by other evolutionary adaptive traits of bonobos, such as their strong attraction to infants and high tolerance towards immatures and out-group individuals.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.