Chimpanzee News - Conservation and Threats

Chimps, like humans, sometimes kill their neighbors for the spoils of land, extra food and and better access to females.

Chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, engage in war-like behavior to gain territory, new research finds.

The findings, published in the latest issue of Current Biology, explain why chimpanzees sometimes brutally kill their neighbors. The killings are most often done by patrolling packs of male chimps that are "quiet and move with stealth," according to lead author John Mitani of the University of Michigan.

To the victors go similar spoils of early human wars: land, often-improved security and strength, extra food and resources, and even better access to females.

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Science and environment reporter, BBC News Two primate species were among the seizures of bushmeat by customs.

About 270 tonnes of illegal bushmeat could be passing through one of Europe's busiest airports each year, the first study of its kind estimates.

A team of researchers says the illicit trade could pose a risk to human or animal health and increase the demand for meat from threatened species. The figure is based on seizures from searches carried out over 17 days at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. The findings appear in the journal Conservation Letters. A team of researchers from France, Cambodia and the UK said it was the "first systematic study of the scale and nature of this international trade". "We estimate that about five tonnes of bushmeat per week is smuggled in personal baggage through Paris Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport," they wrote.

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ill Pruetz often sleeps in the field, waking to African savanna noises and the sight of chimpanzees she has studied for nine years. When Pruetz returns to Ames, she leaves her soft bed to sleep on a cot on the porch.

"I can't sleep but I'm exhausted," she says, drumming her fingers on the arm of her office chair at Iowa State University. "I'm antsy." One of those fingers on her left hand - an empty ring finger - is half missing, bitten off by a captive chimp years ago.

The research takes great personal sacrifice. Pruetz often loses 30 to 40 pounds in the savanna, walking great distances and observing up to 16 hours each day. She has had malaria nine times, once so severe she could only crawl. She rarely sees her boyfriend, Thomas LaDuke, a herpetologist from Pennsylvania.

This story began last Sunday when Jill Pruetz, an anthropologist at Iowa State University, sent out a frantic email: "I just got a phone call from Johnny, my field assistant in Senegal, who told me he thinks that an infant chimp from the Fongoli community was taken by people near the southern end of the range," she wrote.

The initial report was that the baby had been found by two men who had been out hunting when their dogs startled a group of chimpanzees. The apes fled, leaving the baby behind, according to their story.

Pruetz jumped into action. She consulted Janis Carter, who has worked with sanctuary chimps for years in the Gambia and also has ongoing conservation projects in Guinea and Senegal, and then briefly with a vet at Iowa State University about topical medicines for the baby chimp's scrapes and eye injuries, evident in the photo above.

Then she jumped on a plane to Senegal. We didn't hear from Pruetz again until today, when she emailed the good news that the baby chimp was reunited successfully with its mother.

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Scientists in Africa have embarked on two ambitious projects to keep dwindling colonies of wild chimpanzees from dying out.

In Guinea, West Africa, just 13 chimpanzees remain in a virtual island of trees near the Bossou village, an Oxford University zoologist told USA Today.

Zoologist Dora Biro explained that the fading colony is just three-and-a-half miles from a mountain range "full of chimpanzees" that could provide a continuous influx of new residents. The problem is, the groups are separated by a wide stretch of savanna that makes the journey too dangerous.

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This year the Budongo Conservation Field Station celebrates its 20th anniversary – an amazing opportunity to remember and celebrate the research and friendships built up over 20 years of field work; but also a time to look to the future. One of the effects of having researchers around for over 20 years is that now we have a generation of young chimpanzees who were born to mothers already habituated to our presence and who have never known anything unusual about being followed around by these odd, hairless, bipedal apes, who are forever tripping over in the forest and dragging odd looking bags and boxes around with them. While on the one hand this level of comfort with us is a great opportunity to observe chimpanzee behaviour with a minimal amount of disturbance; on the other hand we have to recognize that the behaviour we observe may well be affected by that level of habituation.

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This continuous killing of chimpanzees and baboons is not only endangering the animals but, is also a threat to lives of people living near the forest communities as animals have in past identified human beings as their threat to survival.

Studies from environment researchers show that the ever increasing human population dependent on an already depleted resource is vital to survival of the endangered animals that are on verge of extinction due to habitat encroachment, poaching for bush meat and pet trade that causes conflicts between the animals and farmers.

Last week was International Veterinary Week. The main theme was “one world, one health.” “More co-operation between Veterinarians and Physicians.” Interesting and timely theme it was. It still deserves a lot of attention.

By popular understanding, this theme meant that doctors on either side of the divide (veterinary and human) needed to work closely together in order to ensure animal and human health. Many veterinary and public health concern activities were held all over Uganda.

The public lecture about the theme and the state of zoonoses (diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans and vice versa) was quite interesting for me and I will share some of the information here.

There were talks on; how sleeping sickness is being stamped out of Uganda, the involvement of human medical personnel in the stamping out of sleeping sickness, the role of the Uganda Christian Veterinary Mission in Uganda and how co-operation between vets and medics is helping to save chimpanzees that have been injured by the cruelty of mankind in Uganda.

Officials in New York have identified two strains of simian foamy virus in wildlife imported as food — known as “bushmeat” — from three primate species: two mangabey monkeys and a chimpanzee, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). All of these animals are also endangered.

Preliminary studies show that humans can contract simian foamy virus, but its long-term effects remain unknown. Could another AIDS-like epidemic therefore be on the horizon? The WCS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others are working now to prevent that from happening. A symposium called "Wildlife Conservation and Human Health" is taking place today at Rockefeller University. 

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What does conservation in Washington have to do with chimpanzees in Tanzania? Dr. Elizabeth Gray, Washington director of science for The Nature Conservancy, recently returned from a working trip to Tanzania and told us why it matters for us here to help protect chimpanzees there.

Fifty years ago, Jane Goodall walked into Tanzania’s Gombe forest and changed how we think of chimpanzees and humans.

Wildlife conservationists say in Cameroon, protected species are more endangered than ever before. Experts say the continuing popularity of wildlife meat, or bushmeat, is encouraging armed poachers to gun down hundreds of thousands of animals. But the government has introduced new initiatives to halt the illegal trade.

"We see people selling bushmeat everywhere...and, it’s more or less putting a shame on our dignity and our commitment to fight illegal poaching." From Cameroon’s hinterlands to the urban centers, vendors openly display smoked monkeys, gorillas, snakes, antelopes, crocodiles and more from the country’s receding forests.  For several years, the lucrative trade in meat from wild animals has thrived, despite anti-poaching laws.

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Photo: Divine Ntaryike