Ranging and territoriality in African Apes

Abstract

Intergroup relations vary strikingly among African apes, with only chimpanzees showing intense, often lethal territoriality. The economic defendability hypothesis proposes that such territorial behaviour is favored where home ranges can be economically defended, as indexed by the ratio of daily travel distance to home range diameter. To test this idea, we compiled and analyzed comparable data on yearly home range size, daily travel distance and defendability indices from one population of each nonhuman African ape species and integrated these with comparable published data. We find that bonobos had substantially larger home ranges and longer daily travel distances than chimpanzees and gorillas, contradicting a prevailing assumption that bonobos experience higher or more reliable food abundance. Defendability indices were higher in chimpanzees and bonobos than in mountain gorillas, but did not differ significantly between chimpanzees, bonobos, and western gorillas. Overall, our results indicate that economic defendability alone cannot explain interspecific variation in territoriality and that our current understanding of ecological differences between the species of the genus Pan have to be revised. Possible additional factors shaping space use of neighboring groups include mate competition within groups.