Since its creation more than 20 years ago, the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary has rightfully gained world renown for its primary mission: providing a place where orphaned bonobos can recover from trauma and abuse and eventually return to the wild. Over time the sanctuary and rehabilitation center has also accomplished something less well known. As a steady stream of scientists have journeyed to Lola seeking to learn more about the least-understood member of the great ape family, their research has made the Congolese sanctuary a top research station for bonobos in the world.
First recognized in 1928 to be a separate species, bonobos have been studied in three main settings: zoos, wilderness sites, and Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary. The first substantial observations comparing bonobo and chimpanzee behavior took place at a Munich zoo in the 1930s. Today more than a dozen zoos in the United States and Europe have bonobo populations. Some of them have welcomed researchers who have made important discoveries about bonobos.
Field research on wild bonobos began in 1973 at Wamba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, still an active study site after more than 50 years. A few other field research sites have since been established including in the Lomako-Yokokala Reserve, Salonga National Park, Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, Lilungu, and LuiKotale. Bonobo scientists working in such locations are “heroic,” says evolutionary anthropologist and bonobo expert Brian Hare. He points out that studying wild animals in any remote tropical rainforest poses countless challenges, including safety concerns. The almost ceaseless Congolese political turmoil has increased the difficulty of sustaining field research programs over long periods of time.
Lola offers unique advantages for bonobo research
The Lola sanctuary is unique. Relatively easy to reach (just an hour or so outside Kinshasa), Lola offers comfortable accommodations to scientists who are working there. The sanctuary’s bonobo residents range in age from infancy to adolescence to adulthood. While the older animals spend most of their time in areas that resemble their native habitat, researchers also have access to an extraordinary concentration of young animals in the nursery. “From a scientific perspective, it gives you the ability to study intellectual, emotional, and social development in a way you couldn’t anywhere else,” Hare says. “You can see into the bonobos’ psyche.”
Around 2014, Hare analyzed the contribution of different research sites to discoveries about bonobos. Excited about bonobos and hoping his students would have many opportunities to study them in American zoos, he says he got a big surprise. Although the populations of bonobos in European and American zoos are similar, Hare found that little to no peer-reviewed scientific papers were resulting from work done in the United States. “I don’t know why it’s not happening, but it’s like next to zero. There might be one or two papers per year, compared with 5 or 10 based on European research.”
Fertile ground for bonobo breakthroughs
Even more remarkable is how fertile a ground for research Lola has proven to be. Hare says in just the first seven years after research began at Lola, more than 45 peer-reviewed papers were published using data collected at the sanctuary. Such work appeared in all the highest-impact international scholarly journals, including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Current Biology, and more — five times more articles in the highest-impact international scientific journals than all the U.S. zoos combined. As this work unfolded, the international researchers began training and including as authors the first Congolese scientists focused on bonobo psychology — expanding the next generation of Congolese scientists.
Hare first traveled to Lola in 2005 to conduct what he described as the world’s first quantitative comparison of bonobos and chimpanzees. No one had ever before used the same methods to measure aspects of chimpanzee and bonobo behavior “so that you could mathematically say, ‘Okay, are they doing the same thing or are they doing something different?’ Everything before was qualitative.”
Although some primatologists such as Franz de Waal and Amy Parish had observed captive bonobos behaving in ways that seemed very different from chimpanzees, other influential experts had declared that being in zoos or being fed at field sites had distorted the animals’ behavior. Any perceived differences between bonobos and chimpanzees were exaggerated, according to this view, which was then the dominant one.
With a newly minted Ph.D., Hare resolved, “I’m going to test all this.” He devised a series of behavioral assessments of orphaned chimpanzees and bonobos living in almost identical environments: the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda and Lola ya Bonobo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After conducting the tests, “We were able to say, ‘Okay, here are some things that are similar that people would have thought were different, but I can also give you a laundry list of things that are actually quantitatively different.”
Among the behaviors was tool use. Chimpanzees had been known to make tools to get food. But no evidence had been reported that bonobos ever made or used tools to process or acquire food. “Then you get to Lola and they were sitting there doing it all the time! They were even using stones to crack nuts.”
Studies at Lola starting with Hare’s work also made it clear bonobos differed fundamentally from chimpanzees in many other ways, including how they resolved conflicts, their openness to unfamiliar bonobos, and their willingness to share. Hare today laughs with fresh amazement when he recalls one such delightful surprise. “At the time there was tons of energy and excitement about sharing.” At Lola, Hare first devised an experiment that proved conclusively bonobos readily shared food with their group mates.
That didn’t surprise the Lola staff members. In fact, one key individual - biologist and Lola staff member Suzy Kwetuenda - commented that bonobos would almost certainly share their food with strangers, too. Hare was skeptical. The common wisdom was that only humans were willing to share with strangers or unfamiliar individuals. Hare and Kwetuenda devised a way of putting a bonobo alone with food in a room containing two doors. A familiar bonobo was behind one door, while a stranger was behind the other, and both were visible to the insider. “First of all, the subject could just not open either door and eat all the food,” Hare says. “Which is what a chimpanzee would do.” But the bonobo subjects did something very different. Almost always, they let the stranger in.”
The experiment then took a turn that astonished everyone. “The hilarious thing, what we never anticipated, was that something like 40% of the time, when the unfamiliar bonobos entered the room, instead of going straight to the food, they would go to the other door and open it for the individual that was strange to them! We never, ever thought that would happen. We were just laughing and laughing.”
Since then, researchers have published scores of additional studies based on research among the bonobos of Lola ya Bonobo, significantly advancing humankind’s knowledge of our closest great ape cousins. “For 20 years now, Lola has been a stable research presence,” Hare says. “ It’s a very stable place that will stay very stable because of where it is.”
Jeannette De Wyze was a journalist at the San Diego Reader for 30 years. Today she’s a bonobo lover and supporter and the volunteer liaison between Women’s Empowerment International and the Nyaka Grannies Project in Uganda. She also raises puppies to be service dogs for Canine Companions for Independence and is an active travel blogger.