Sonya Pashchevskaya

My incredible supervisor got a medal for her work in Congo with bonobos

🔥

Jane Goodall's first NatGeo article (1963), a birthday present from Daniil Rudenko during my first African field work, helped me believe that one day my life among wild bonobos could also be worth telling about. I am grateful Jane has existed and has changed the world for so many of us primates.

Also many thanks to @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social, @imprs-qbee.bsky.social and @daadworldwide.bsky.social who make my research, travels and said Gala dinners possible!

Talked about bonobos at @behaviour2025.bsky.social in Kolkata. Thanks to the organizers and all the brave people who made it to the sessions on the last conference day after a rather fun Gala dinner...

I want to choose violence..

Many thanks to @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social, @daadworldwide.bsky.social, Centre for Research and Conservation, Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp, Belgium.

I recorded a video of a female bonobo drinking water from an empty Cola pod. Tool-aided drinking has only been reported in wild bonobos 4 times at Lomako with moss sponges. Here, we discuss the differences between the Pan species and speculate on ecological conditions driving extractive foraging.

Wild bonobos do not use tools for extractive foraging, unlike their closest relatives, the chimpanzees. In captivity, however, bonobos appear just as adept at tool use as chimps, suggesting that cognitive capacity is not the reason for the lack of behaviour in the wild.

Tool use by a wild bonobo in LuiKotale, a report of water scooping: Since I was in the remote Congo when our paper with my mentors Barbara Fruth and Gottfried Hohmann came out, I will catch up now! link.springer.com/article/10.1... -->