Sex sells, also in the jungle. According to a study carried out in Côte d'Ivoire by researchers from the German Max Planck Institute for Anthropology, female chimpanzees copulate more frequently with males who share the meat they hunt with them.
Until now there was no evidence of this exchange of sex for meat , says Cristina Gomes, one of the authors of the study, which is published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE . Gomes and his colleague Christopher Boesch have spent three years studying a group of chimpanzees made up of 5 males, 14 females and about twenty youngsters and adolescents in the Taï National Park, in the Ivory Coast. There they were able to verify that female chimpanzees had sex more frequently with males that gave them meat, even though they had only been given food once, indicating that sharing the game improves the male's chances of mating.
