Dr Adriana Lowe worked on infanticidal behaviour by wild chimpanzees, collating observations made in the Budongo Forest, Uganda.
Work led by Dr Adriana Lowe as part of her PhD research supervised by Dr Nicholas E. Newton-Fisher, has been presented by the Journal ‘Primates’ with its Social Impact Award for 2021, in recognition of the significant interest generated by the study in the media, on social networking sites, and through full-text downloads.
This work concerns infanticidal behaviour by wild chimpanzees, collating observations made in the Budongo Forest, Uganda, over a 24 year period to create the largest dataset of infanticides from within a single chimpanzee community. As this behaviour is rare, it has not been possible, previously, to test the various hypotheses that have been proposed to explain its occurrence. Dr Lowe tested multiple hypotheses and found most support for the “sexual selection” hypothesis: that infanticide is a behaviour used by adult males to secure reproductive advantage for themselves. Infanticide by females was much rarer than that by males, but sexual selection, operating through intra-sexual competition, may also explain the evolution of female-commited infanticide. Cannibalism was infrequent and partial, suggesting this was a by-product, and there was no evidence that infanticide was part of a male strategy to eliminate future competitors.
The work was conducted in collaboration with the Budongo Conservation Field Station, Dr Catherine Hobaiter (University of St. Andrews), Dr Caroline Asiimwe, and Prof Klaus Zuberbühler (University of Neuchâtel). Multiple people over more than two decades contributed observations to this dataset, and the study’s authors are grateful to all those individuals.
This work is part of ongoing collaboration between the Budongo Conservation Research Station and Dr Newton-Fisher, who has long-standing research links to this study site having conducted the first detailed behavioural research on these chimpanzees in the 1990s.
As scientific research director, Prof. Klaus Zuberbühler has led an expansion in the volume of high quality research at this site, facilitating opportunities for productive collaboration, while Dr Hobaiter has long-standing research interests in these chimpanzees, instigating and expanding research onto a second chimpanzee community. Dr Hobaiter also administers the study-site’s long-term data.