Meat for *** fair to chimps

BEIJING, April 9 (Xin***) -- Human females may get offended at dates who expect a little something extra after they buy a steak dinner, but for chimpanzees, the exchange may be a fair one, according tofindingsinthe Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE as quoted by media reports Thursday.

Researchersfound that female chimpanzees mate more frequently with males who often share meat with them.

"Our results strongly suggest that wild chimpanzees exchange meat for ***, and do so on a long-term basis," Cristina Gomes of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said in a statement.

"Males who shared meat with females doubled their mating success, whereas females, who had difficulty obtaining meat on their own, increased their caloric intake without suffering the energetic costs and potential risk of injury related to hunting."

Writing in the journal, Gomes and colleague Christophe Boesch said they watched chimps living in the Tai National Park in Ivory Coast.

"The meat for-*** hypothesis is a plausible explanation for male-female meat sharing in this species, as chimpanzees are highly promiscuous, they have a certain degree of female choice and hunters can usually control the sharing of their catch," they wrote.

Males were more likely to share meat with females whose bodies showed they were in a fertile period, but even excluding these couplings, it was clear that mating behaviour occurred more often between males and the females they were regularly sharing meat with.

(Agencies)