Female chimpanzees can be as ferocious and deadly as males, given the right set of circumstances. Males of the species are infamous for their violent behaviour, but now a gang of female chimpanzees have been spotted killing an infant in Budongo forest in Uganda.
Simon Townsend of the University of St Andrews, UK, and colleagues suspect two other infants met their ends in similar ways.
Infanticide by females has been reported before, notably by Jane Goodall in Gombe, Tanzania. In that case several infants were killed and eaten by a mother-daughter pair. It wasn’t clear if those killings were the…
