Male chimps are mummy's boys! Bonobo mothers find mates for their sons to help them become fathers - but leave their daughters to sort their own love life out

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Bonobo mothers help their sons to become fathers by introducing them to prospective partners.  

Their strategies include putting them in close proximity to ovulating females and physically preventing other males from competing with them. 

This match-making increases the animal's chance of producing off-spring by three-fold, but - despite this - the mothers frequently neglect to help their daughters. 

Scientists say this is because males hold dominant positions over females in the bonobo community. 

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Bonobo mothers help their sons to find suitable mates by presenting them to females. They succeed in their endeavour - increasing the chance of their sons becoming fathers by three-fold (stock)

Research Group Leader Dr Martin Surbeck, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, observed wild bonobos in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

He then compared them to wild chimpanzees in Côte d'Ivoire, Tanzania, and Uganda. 

Mothers from both communities helped their sons in combat, but only the bonobos had a positive impact on their mating success.

'This is the first time that we can show the impact of the mother's presence on a very important male fitness trait, which is their fertility,' he said. 

'We were surprised to see that the mothers have such a strong, direct influence on the number of grandchildren they get.

'In Bonobo social systems, the daughters disperse from the native community and the sons stay. And for the few daughters that stay in the community, which we don't have many examples of, we don't see them receiving any help from their mothers.

While both Bonobo and chimpanzee mothers would advocate for their sons in male-on-male conflicts, female Bonobos went the extra mile to help their sons with mating (stock)

'These females have found a way to increase their reproductive success without having more offspring themselves.' 

By doing so, the mothers get to spread their genes without having to have more children themselves - at least that's Surbeck's theory.

They also seem to be maximising their time on Earth because bonobo mothers 'do not have a substantial post-reproductive lifespan'. 

Bonobos are historically known as 'pygymy chimpanzees' and closely related to chimps - with the two species the only ones in the genus 'Pan'. 

The results of the observational study were published in Current Biology.