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ETHESDA, MARYLAND—On a humid morning in May 2024, two young male chimpanzees in the Kibale Forest of Uganda sat sponging up water from a puddle with a leaf and languidly dribbling it into their mouths. Suddenly, an adolescent female chimp named Virginia threw a large branch at one of them. Her bottom was pink and swollen, signaling that at age 10, she was beginning to mature sexually. But the object of her attention, a 9-year-old adolescent male named Sufjan, ignored her behavior, and eventually she gave up, making a dramatic exit on a liana vine.
Virginia was just being a teen. She “was saying, ‘Pay attention to me,’ whether to play or antagonize,” says graduate student Isabelle Clark at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, who narrated the video last month to a working group on adaptive social learning in adolescence. Through her outbursts, Virginia was “learning how to attract the interest of males,” says Clark, who filmed the video as part of her research on how territorial behavior develops in juvenile and adolescent chimps at the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Uganda.
ETHESDA, MARYLAND—On a humid morning in May 2024, two young male chimpanzees in the Kibale Forest of Uganda sat sponging up water from a puddle with a leaf and languidly dribbling it into their mouths. Suddenly, an adolescent female chimp named Virginia threw a large branch at one of them. Her bottom was pink and swollen, signaling that at age 10, she was beginning to mature sexually. But the object of her attention, a 9-year-old adolescent male named Sufjan, ignored her behavior, and eventually she gave up, making a dramatic exit on a liana vine.
Virginia was just being a teen. She “was saying, ‘Pay attention to me,’ whether to play or antagonize,” says graduate student Isabelle Clark at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, who narrated the video last month to a working group on adaptive social learning in adolescence. Through her outbursts, Virginia was “learning how to attract the interest of males,” says Clark, who filmed the video as part of her research on how territorial behavior develops in juvenile and adolescent chimps at the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Uganda.