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When a male bonobo oversteps his bounds — say, by hopping into a tree and shaking the branches while others are just trying to feed — females in the troop tend to act fast.
They kick him, they chase him, they scream at him — getting so loud, according to behavioral ecologist Barbara Fruth, “you have to block your ears.”
Male bonobos are decidedly bigger than females. Yet unlike so many other species with large differences in size between the sexes, when it comes to deciding when to mate with and who gets first dibs at food, female bonobos tend to be the ones in charge.
For decades, it has been a mystery why females of this great ape species, one of humanity’s closest living relatives, are perched so high in the hierarchy.