70 Diet and culture at Sonso
Muga was seen sitting down with two other adult males, Magosi on one side and Maani on the other.
A subadult male Andy sat behind him. Magosi was eating the fruit and Muga was staring at his face
from a distance of 30 cm. A further 4 minutes later Magosi pulled off a hand sized piece of fruit and
handed it to Muga. Muga took the piece and Magosi grunted. Muga finished his piece and stared at
Magosi again, at which Magosi gave him another piece, grunting again when it was accepted. After
this, Muga began to help himself, breaking off pieces of fruit while Magosi continued to hold it. This
continued with Muga taking more and more pieces until he took the remaining piece from Magosi
and started feeding on it. This piece was about one third of the size of the original fruit. Then Magosi
took it back and Muga continued to take pieces from it as before. 26 minutes after the start Magosi put
the remaining fruit down and walked away. Muga continued to feed on it and was then approached
by Andy but turned his back on him. Andy began to groom Muga’s back but stopped after a short
time, and 5 minutes later Muga laid the remaining part of the fruit down in front of Andy who fed on
it. 20 minutes later all three males left the area, abandoning the fruit core (Bethell et al. 2000).As Bethell et al. point out, the sharing described above resembles the way
chimpanzees share meat (Boesch and Boesch 1989). It is better described as active
sharing than as passive sharing. Active non-familial sharing has been reported by
McGrew (1975) in a situation when bunches of bananas were artificially supplied to
chimpanzees, with ‘adult males giving bananas to unrelated females’. Since the
observations described above, Nakamura and Itoh (2001) have described two further
cases of fruit-sharing at Mahale, Tanzania. The first involved sharing two lemons
between two young adult males, Bonobo (odd name for a chimp!) and Alofu, both
aged 15 years, after which a female in oestrus, Ako, joined them and slowly took one
lemon that Alofu had put on the ground in front of him. In the second case, the fruit
concerned was Voacanga africana, one of the largest fruits in Mahale, about 1 kg in
weight and 15 cm in diameter. A 19-year-old male, Dogura, approached a lower ranking
male Masudi (22 years old) who was chewing a mouthful of Voacangapulp and begged
by extending his hand to Masudi’s mouth and continued to do this 26 times, obtaining
some of the pulp 15 times with his index finger. As the authors note, these large
and sometimes aggressive adult males were wholly tolerant of each other on this
occasion.
On 9 January 1998 two adult females from the Sonso community, Zimba and her
daughter Kewaya, were observed by Zephyr Kiwede, Emma Stokes, James Kakura and
Clea Assersohn sharing an unripe fruit of Desplatsia dewevrei. These fruits are about
20 cm in diameter with a very hard outer husk which is difficult to break open. Zimba
(with her infant Zig clinging to her belly) found a Desplatsiatree with four fruits only
on one branch, she detached the branch and started feeding on a fruit. Kewaya
approached her and extended an open hand towards Zimba’s mouth in a begging ges-
ture. Three times Kewaya was successful in taking fruit out of Zimba’s mouth, after
which Zimba turned away and rejected her solicitations. A short while later Kewaya
resumed and succeeded a further seven times; the observers classified this as ‘tolerated
scrounging’. Zimba dropped a fruit and Kewaya descended to the ground and then started
to feed on it. Five minutes later, Zimba transferred some of the food to her infant daughter,