Many social animals share child-rearing duties, but research publishing May 20 in the journal Current Biology finds that bonobo moms go the extra step and actually take action to ensure their sons will become fathers. From physically preventing other males from mating to bringing their sons in close proximity to ovulating females, bonobo moms bring new meaning to the notion of being overbearing—but in so doing, they increase their sons' chance of fatherhood three-fold. […]

Chimpanzees in captivity can successfully work out how to use tools to excavate underground food, even if they've never been presented with an underground food scenario before, according to a study published May 15, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alba Motes-Rodrigo and colleagues and directed by Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar from the University of Oslo. […]

Many eloquent commentators have waxed lyrical about their first encounter with mountain gorillas—most notably Sir David Attenborough, vice-president of Fauna & Flora International (FFI) since 1979, the same year that those iconic scenes from Life on Earth were first broadcast. […]

Two sniffling chimps could be one too many for a wild chimpanzee community susceptible to respiratory disease outbreaks, report Morris Animal Foundation-funded researchers at the University of Minnesota. The team's findings were a result of their development of a syndromic surveillance system to noninvasively and preemptively detect a potential outbreak of respiratory disease. The study recently was published in EcoHealth. […]

Small differences in a liver cell protein have significant impacts on hepatitis C virus replication in mice and humans, findings that could facilitate the development of a mouse model of the infection. The report, led by researchers at Princeton University, was published today in the journal eLife. […]