Chimps Caught in Meat-for-Sex Scandal

Here’s a story with everything: chimps, meat, and sex.

Specifically, a new study suggests that male chimps trade meat for sex in the wild. Here’s the theory, from the study’s abstract:

[M]ales and females exchange meat for sex, which would result in males increasing their mating success and females increasing their caloric intake without suffering the energetic costs and potential risk of injury related to hunting. Although chimpanzees have been shown to share meat extensively with females, there has not been much direct evidence in this species to support the meat-for-sex hypothesis. Here we show that female wild chimpanzees copulate more frequently with those males who, over a period of 22 months, share meat with them. We excluded other alternative hypotheses to exchanging meat for sex, by statistically controlling for rank of the male, age, rank and gregariousness of the female, association patterns of each male-female dyad and meat begging frequency of each female

This meat-sharing, according to the researchers’ observations, happens during both fertile and infertile periods for the female chimps. Basically it’s a long-term meat-for-sex arrangement. As one of the researchers put it: “What’s amazing is that if a male shares with a particular female, he doubles the number of times he copulates with her, which is likely to increase the probability of fertilizing that female.”

Further study is planned in humans — specifically, in hunter-gatherer societies.

Of course, the Onion already covered this: Housewife Charged in Sex-For-Security Scam.

Image via Wikipedia