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Chimpanzees' 'Sex And The City' style lives

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 18/06/2008

When it comes to sex, the females amongst our closest living relatives are more concerned with having as many males as possible than with finding one ideal mate or "Mr Big", new research shows.

Female chimpanzees lead promiscuous lives that mark them out as Sex And The City style sexual predators

Their behaviour bears comparison with the antics of the four glamorous New York friends in the hit television series recently made into a film, whose lives revolve around sex, talking about sex and shopping. The apes are promiscuous to make all the high-ranking males think they are the father: by confusing the issue paternity, the top males are more likely to provide that female with future support with child care. But unlike the uninhibited love-making sessions of Samantha, the "try-sexual" played by Kim Cattrall, her closest living relatives prefer to do it quietly when love rivals are nearby, to avoid being punished by jealous peers, says the study by Simon Townsend and Dr Klaus Zuberbhler at St Andrews. The female apes produced more "copulation calls" - the sounds they make during sex - to act as "hello boys" calls to lure even more mates but became coy when high-ranking females were nearby, they report in the journal PLoS ONE. Males, by comparison, only make "quiet pants." The research sheds new light on the sophisticated mental capacities and social intelligence of our closest living relatives. Mr Townsend said this was savvy behaviour. "Competition between females can be dangerously high in wild chimpanzees. We think that by being quiet, you are less likely to incite aggression from other females. "Our findings highlight the fact that these females use their copulation calls in highly tactical ways to minimise the risks associated with such competition." The function of copulation calls has been debated for years and many thought that they were an inducement for males to compete with each other. Not so, says the new study. "The female chimps we observed in the wild seemed to be much more concerned with having sex with as many different males as possible, without other females finding out about it," he said. The study was carried out in the Budongo Forest, Uganda, in collaboration with Tobias Deschner of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig but there are limits to how relevant it is to humans, they stress. Older literature indicates that women also "may suppress copulatory vocalisations possibly due to the fear of being overheard," he said. This is a far cry from, Meg Ryan's noisy sounds of rapture in her famous "I'll have what she's having" scene in the 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally. "To be honest we prefer to stay away from generalising behaviours we see in chimps to the same behaviours in humans," said Mr Townsend.

"Chimpanzees and humans evolved away from each other six million years ago and therefore, just because chimpanzee females exhibit certain behaviours does not have any major bearing on subsequent human behaviour."