iStockphoto / Fabien Chesneau / USO
Field biologists in Uganda have been following and tracking the behaviors of Ngogo chimpanzees for over a decade. What they found is these chimpanzees have been engaged in the deadliest civil war ever documented among animals and it has been ongoing now for 10+ years.
Their findings were published this week in the journal Science in a research paper titled ‘Lethal conflict after group fission in wild chimpanzees.’ That is a gentle way of saying ‘the Ngogo chimpanzees in Uganda splintered in a civil war and have been violently murdering each other for a decade.’
Uganda Chimpanzees Waging Deadly Civil War
The findings are significant because the paper points out this is the first time that “lethal conflict among groups of animals that were once socially affiliated has not previously been observed outside of humans, in whom cultural ideologies can drive divisions among individuals within the same group.”
Animals kill other animals, yes. It is a dog eat dog world out there. Humans sit atop the food chain and rarely recognize the brutal realities of nature unless we are witnessing it firsthand… Then there’s this, something entirely different than animals killing for sustenance, for survival.
They found the Ngogo chimpanzees in Uganda fractured into two distinct groups many years ago and one group has since “conducted multiple lethal raids upon the other, leading to the death of both adults and infants.” Sacha Vignieri, one of the authors of the paper, writes that “the unrelated deaths of key interconnected individuals may have contributed to the eventually violent split.”
This story has gained global attention overnight since the paper was published on April 9th. The New York Times picked it up, noting the sheer size of the Ngogo chimpanzees’ clan at over 100 apes is what first drew scientists to study them.
When they first started studying the Ngogo chimpanzees everything was pleasant. There was another faction and when the chimps would cross paths things were cordial. At this point, the group had grown to 200+ apes.
What started the civil war?!
Dr. John Mitani is a primatologist at the University of Michigan and the founder of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, he told the Times “they start grooming each other, they start socializing, they start acting as one.”
Then everything changed on June 25, 2015. Dr. Mitani says they were following chimpanzees when the apes took off running down a slope. Chimps from the Central cluster crossed paths with chimps from the Western cluster. Dr. John Mitani says “all hell broke loose.”
The Central and Western chimps fought, things turned deadly, but where things really got weird was these interactions continued for several years despite never having been documented before. These were chimpanzees who used to interact, groom one another, join up and change sides, everything was cordial…then the bloodshed came.
The Times writes that “it became so common that young chimpanzees got nervous just hearing the calls of mature males in the distance. By 2018, the confrontations were turning deadly.”
The killing that began in 2018 has not stopped. Dr. Mitani alone has witnessed 28 deaths among these Ngogo chimpanzees and among those 28 it includes 19 infants.
According to the published findings, the unusually large size of the Ngogo chimpanzees group (200 apes) could be a contributing factor as food scarcity may come into play. The findings also cites 3 distinct contributing factors to the ongoing civil war.
The first was a “major network shift was preceded by the death of five adult males and one adult female in 2014” while the cause of death of those chimps remains unknown. The second contributing factor was a change in the supposed ‘alpha male’ in 2015. And the third contributing factor they write is “a respiratory epidemic” which “killed 25 chimpanzees” in January 2017.
All three contributing factors very much changed the landscape of the groups and are believed to have contributed to the ongoing civil war.
Netflix has a gnarly documentary on these chimpanzees if you are up to watching:
I can’t help but think about my late grandmother whose parents had chimpanzees when she was little. She’d tell me stories about how the chimps would steal her dresses and wear them to dinner. I thought she was making it all up until I saw an old family video and the chimps were in it, wearing her clothes. It blew my mind.
The thought of them turning violent in an instant is terrifying. They are incredibly strong, agile, and evidently capable of atrocities for reasons that still remain somewhat unknown.