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Baby
chimpanzee
Credit: Michael Neugebauer
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We
have a two-year grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
for me and our epidemiologist here at the zoo (in partnership
with the Jane Goodall Institute) to try to implement a health
monitoring system for the chimps at Gombe — because one
of the leading causes of death there is disease.
Gombe has a long history of behavioral research, which serves
us fantastically. But scientifically-collected and -designed
health monitoring has only been done very recently in any
animal species and certainly in chimps. Having our epidemiologist
on staff is a great way to pull in various expertise here
at the zoo to really help a wild population. We can investigate
the causes and effects of disease and assess the risks of
disease — and once we assess them, figure out how to
mitigate them. There's no reason for chimps to be dying of
disease if we find there's a way to prevent that. A lot of
times we don't know exactly what the diseases are b/c we don't
do invasive sampling, things like looking at blood and tissue
samples. We can only guess from observed symptoms. A lot of
chimp populations show respiratory-type symptoms — coughing,
sneezing, running noses. Also, in central Africa, carcasses
have been found to be infected with Ebola.
On the challenges facing chimp populations:
Gombe has a lot of the problems that most great ape populations
have. I call them the Big Three. The primary one is habitat
destruction and fragmentation. Mitigating disease when they
don't have a place to live is not all that effective. Habitat
fragmentation is certainly the biggest one that the great
ape populations all over the world are facing. The second
one is poaching for bush meat and for the pet trade. There's
still a huge illegal pet trade, especially with orangutans
in Southeast Asia. And the third one is the effect of disease.
You've got habitat fragmentation, poaching, and disease. Then
all of those three factors are made more powerful with the
combined effects that these are very small, isolated populations
we're dealing with. So then you throw in small population
biology where a disease or a poaching team can run through
and wipe out a large number of your animals and you get the
risks of extinction just skyrocketing.
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Group
of chimpanzees traveling through the forest.
Credit:
Michael Neugebauer
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So for Gombe, our real problems there are habitat issues
and disease — we don't have as much poaching in comparison
to other sites in West Africa. Historically, the local people
that live around Gombe do not eat primate meat. Now that's
been changing a bit because some of the refugee communities
that are coming from Congo and Burundi do eat that as part
of their culture. So we have had a few, but certainly not
like they have in Congo and West Africa where you can have
a whole community wiped out by logging camps that come in
and poach.
On the evolution of chimp tool-use:
It's not hard to imagine — as we did around the campfire
at the end of the day in the field at Gombe — how termite
fishing was discovered. It seems pretty universal — there's
actually been a study published on this in Nature. One of
the universal things that all chimps everywhere do is use
tools to probe something. By that I mean when something is
either unfamiliar or out of reach, they grab a stick and touch
it with that stick first, and sniff it, something like that.
It's not hard to imagine a chimp walking by a termite mound,
seeing a hole and thinking 'Hey, what's in there?' and it
just evolving from there.
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Chimps
reaping the benefits of termite fishing
Credit: Joshua Leonard
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Occurrences of those behaviors starting anew and actually
being observed by researchers are relatively rare. But they
have happened. Jane talks about them in some of her books
about some trendy behaviors that came in fashion in the chimp
community for a while and then went away. She called them
fads. And there have been some researchers that have been
able to witness the onset of a new behavior.
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