Jill Pruetz

West African chimpanzees living in a savanna at Fongoli, Senegal systematically hunt Galagos with tools, a behavior not recorded in other chimpanzee communities, save for a few anecdotes. Females exhibit this hunting behavior more than expected, exceeding rates of tool-assisted hunting by males, who hunt with tools less than expected. The lack of prey theft seems to incentivize this behavior in females, who then share meat with others. The explanation underlying this prosocial behavior is the question of interest here. With almost 20 years of long-term behavioral data, we can now decipher the social behavior and organization of these apes living at the edge of their species’ range in Africa to test hypotheses surrounding this unique behavior more thoroughly and the prosocial behavior that allows females to hunt and retain ownership of their captures, in addition to sharing meat with other group members. Keeping the conservative observation protocol of targeting only adult males for focal follows but using scan sampling to record adolescent and adult female chimpanzee behavior at Fongoli will provide information on female diet, ranging, activity and other aspects of their behavioral ecology that will help answer this question and inform hypotheses regarding hominin prosocial behavior evolution.