Chimpanzee News - Conservation and Threats
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Biology and Behaviour | Evolution and Genetics | Captive Chimpanzees | Other Great Apes
CDC expands ‘bush meat’ tests for viruses
14-01-2012 - The Washington Post
Bloody, raw, smoked or dried, untold thousands of pounds monkey parts, giant African cane rats and other illegal “bush meat” slips into the United States each year.
For some of the Washington area’s African residents, the meat is a taste of home, a treat for the holidays and reunions.
“It’s a delicacy, for special occasions,” said Sambourou Diop, a Gabonese national living in the region, who sampled bush meat in his West African homeland but has not eaten it here.
For the nation’s disease detectives, though, bloody bags of wild meat could mean big trouble. They’re worried about exotic viruses causing a deadly outbreak — or, in the worst case, an AIDS-like pandemic.
That’s why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched an expanded effort to test confiscated bush meat for potentially dangerous viruses after a two-year pilot study.
Closing in on Africa’s bush meat trade
29-01-2012 - The New York Times
For people in West and Central Africa, eating just one kind of bush meat might be compared to dining on roast turkey night after night in the United States. People may enjoy eating it on Thanksgiving and Christmas, notes the conservationist John Fa, “but it’s not something I want to eat every single day of my life.”
As I explained in a post here on Tuesday afternoon, recent studies of bush meat consumption in Africa offer insights into potential ways of protecting threatened and endangered species.
Dr. Fa, the chief conservation officer for Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust on the Channel Island of Jersey, suggests that taste preferences could be critical to devising those strategies. In Africa, the rarity of a species does not necessarily confer gourmet or prestige status on its meat; it’s the taste and the affordability that matter most. So even though Africans like bush meat, providing tasty alternatives like frozen fish or chicken could easily alleviate pressure on threatened animals, Dr. Fa said.
Gorillas and chimpanzees to end up on a plate
11-12-2011 - Earth Times
The Max Planck Institute in Leipzig have surveyed 109 resource management areas in Africa for twenty years to reach profoundly disturbing conclusions. The future of our nearest relatives is in doubt. In order to literally combat (in some cases) the decline of the Great Apes, it is now necessary to quantify the effects of every conservation measure. In that way, we can use resources to their best effect. The four different types of conservation are law enforcement guards; tourism; research and non-governmental organisations.
In 16 countries throughout the continent, prolonged conservation measures do decrease the probability of ape extinction. Lack of law enforcement on the other hand, and to a much less degree, lack of tourism and research significantly increase the risks of disappearance in an area.
Antibody neutralizes Sudan virus
22-11-2011 - Laboratory Equipments
| Scientists from The Scripps Research Institute and the US Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases have isolated and analyzed an antibody that neutralizes Sudan virus, a major species of ebolavirus and one of the most dangerous human pathogens. “We suspect that we’ve found a key spot for neutralizing ebolaviruses,” says Scripps Research Associate Prof. Erica Ollmann Saphire, who led the study with US Army virologist John Dye. The new findings, which were reported in an advance online edition of Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, show the antibody attaches to Sudan virus in a way that links two segments of its coat protein, reducing their freedom of movement and severely hindering the virus’s ability to infect cells. |
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Stopping bushmeat is good for conservation—and bad for hunger
22-11-2011 - Ecocentric
I wrote a piece recently for the paper magazine—sadly behind the paymoat—on the viral ecologist Nathan Wolfe. Wolfe's Global Viral Forecasting group has set up research teams in hotspots around the world—places like central Africa, China and Southeast Asia—where animal diseases are likely to cross over to human beings. That spillover has seeded most of new infectious diseases plaguing humanity—including swine flu and HIV—and it tends to happen when human beings and wild animals come into close contact, when blood or other bodily fluids can pass easily from one species to another. And how does that close contact occur? |
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Ivory Coast: Race to save the chimps
12-11-2011 - Global Post
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — On a humid October day in a tropical forest in the middle of Abidjan, members of Ymako Theatri theater group, dressed in black suits, jump to the beat of drums and sing: "Chimpan-zees are our cou-sins! Let’s not eat them any-more! Let’s not kill them any-more!" The rhythm is catchy and the performers are energized, singing: "We must protect the forest for the future of our children!" Today, like always, the audience is rapt. The long-established international theater and dance troupe has been working with the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation since 2002 to hammer home a message of conservation in villages around national parks in Ivory Coast and beyond. It’s a message this country can use. |
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Chimp to man to history books: The path of AIDS
17-10-2011 - The New York Times
Our story begins sometime close to 1921, somewhere between the Sanaga River in Cameroon and the Congo River in the former Belgian Congo. It involves chimps and monkeys, hunters and butchers, “free women” and prostitutes, syringes and plasma-sellers, evil colonial lawmakers and decent colonial doctors with the best of intentions. And a virus that, against all odds, appears to have made it from one ape in the central African jungle to one Haitian bureaucrat leaving Zaire for home and then to a few dozen men in California gay bars before it was even noticed — about 60 years after its journey began.
GROUNDWORK Dr. Jacques Pépin’s work in the 1980s in Nioki, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, gave him clues that helped him on the trail of H.I.V.
Most books about AIDS begin in 1981, when gay American men began dying of a rare pneumonia. In “The Origins of AIDS,” published last week by Cambridge University Press, Dr. Jacques Pépin, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, performs a remarkable feat.
National parks do not contribute to poverty, finds decade-long study
24-08-2011 - Mongabay.com
A new study of Uganda's Kibale National Park refutes the conventional wisdom that parks cause poverty along their borders. "Apparently the park provides a source of insurance; [locals] can hunt, or sell firewood or thatch from the park," explains Jennifer Alix-Garcia, co-author of the study, with the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "It's misleading. If you look, you see more poor people living near the park. But when you look at the change in assets, you see that the poor people who live next to the park have lost less than poor people who live further away."
The study took place between 1996 and 2006, beginning three years after the creation of Kibale National Park in western Uganda. Two hundred and fifty-two households were surveyed.
Should Rwanda relocate humans to make room for chimpanzees?
16-08-2011 - Scientific American
The endangered eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in Rwanda’s Gishwati Forest could be doomed unless they increase their gene pool, an unlikely event if humans don’t get out of the way first, the Global Post reports. After decades of habitat loss, just 20 chimpanzees—up from 13 in 2008— live in the remaining 8.8 square kilometers of Gishwati. That makes it what many believe to be the world’s densest population of chimpanzees. Of course, Rwanda also has the highest human population density in all of Africa, with more than 10 million people crowded into a land that has already lost much of its natural resources. |
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Orphan chimpanzees successfully released into the wild using advanced GPS technology
07-04-2011 - ScienceDaily
| The 2008 release of 12 orphan chimpanzees into the wild using sophisticated GPS tracking technology has been deemed a success by the project team. The release was the first of its kind to use VHF-GPS store-on-board ARGOS tracking collars to monitor the progress of the chimpanzees. The ARGOS system emits GPS points to satellites downloadable via the internet. It is also only the second time that rehabilitated chimpanzees have been released back into the wild in an area where other wild chimpanzees live. The project is being carried out by the Chimpanzee Conservation Centre in the Haut Niger National Park, Guinea, West Africa. This centre is one of 14 Pan African Sanctuary Alliance (PASA)-accredited sanctuaries caring for chimpanzee victims of the pet and bush meat trade. |
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