Dr. Karen Lips remembers when she came across the first infected frog at her pristine research valley in the cloud forest of El Cope in Panama.

For eight years, a team of scientists worked with Lips, a conservation biologist at the University of Maryland, to stake out conditions at the site, logging the number of frogs, tadpoles, and eggs for each frog species. They surveyed almost 30,000 amphibians. The team also kept track of where the frogs lived, when they bred, and the types of predators they faced.

“Everything was great until one day we found an infected frog. The next week we found the first dead frog. And within the next 4 months, we found 400 dead frogs,” says Lips. The frogs were infected with an amphibian skin fungus. “Seventy percent of the species that occurred there were found either dead or infected.”

By the next year, all the frogs in the streams had disappeared. Now, above the mountain streams of El Cope, the cloud forest is eerily silent – devoid of once-ubiquitous frog calls, but also of the rustling of snakes and the scrambling of lizards. The streambeds grow slick with algae that blooms unchecked without interference from snacking tadpoles stirring up sediment. The tadpoles also infused the crystal-clear streams with nitrogen – important for plant growth.

“The minute the tadpoles are gone, the water quality changes,” says Lips. “Whatever happens in those headwaters has an impact downstream.”

The fungus epidemic at El Cope documented how the disappearance of frogs triggers a chain reaction in an ecosystem. The storm front of the amphibian fungus is advancing 14 to 62 miles per year on every continent but Asia. It’s probably responsible for the extinction of at least 100 amphibian species since the 1970s. But the biggest menace to frogs remains habitat loss from development, pollution, and global climate change.

With nearly a third of the known 6,300 species under threat, scientists are racing to better understand the role of the frog in our world. Frog science may evoke the smell of formaldehyde and the image of scalpels glinting by pinned and splayed legs, but scientists have been turning to frogs — while they’re still alive — to better understand the health of our ecosystems and our bodies.

The evidence of algae growth spurred by tadpole declines describes only one fractured link in the ecological chain anchored by frogs. Wasps and spiders eat frog eggs; shrimp, fish, and dragonfly nymphs eat tadpoles; birds, snakes, and lizards eat frogs; and frogs in turn eat a wide variety of worms and insects.

“Amphibians play a huge role in these ecosystems in terms of feeding on insects and flies, many of which are disease vectors for lots of human diseases,” says Lips.

By eating pests like mosquitoes and their larvae, frogs may control the spread of diseases like avian malaria and dengue fever.

As a side effect of filling their bellies with bugs, some frogs concentrate chemicals called alkaloids in their skins. The frogs act as vacuum cleaners, sucking up insects or mites that contain the alkaloids. Studying the skins of poison frogs has yielded a catalog of over 800 alkaloids.

Researchers are just beginning to explore the chemical goldmine to be found in the skins of frogs, especially tropical and Australian frogs – the very frogs that are hardest hit by the amphibian chytrid fungus. Chemicals secreted and sequestered by frogs may turn out to be very useful to humans.

In the wild, the one-inch-long poison dart frog secretes enough of an alkaloid called batrachotoxin to kill 100 people. The poison locks open the sodium channel in nerve cells, potentially leading to cardiac arrest. Scientists examine the channel’s mechanism to study drugs like anesthetics and antidepressants.

The lessons locked in alkaloids may be able to be used to create non-addictive painkillers, appetite suppressants, and medicines to fight Alzheimer’s disease. Several pharmaceutical companies — Abbott Labs and Cephalon Chemicals among them — are exploring chemical equivalents to the frog alkaloids.

Another pharmaceutical company, Genaera, examined another type of chemical secreted by frogs – protein-like molecules, or peptides, called magainins that help frogs’ skin heal quickly from wounds. Magainins can be antifungal, antiparasitic, antibiotic, and antiviral.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, found magainins in the red-eyed Australian tree frog that may block infection by HIV – the virus that causes AIDS. The peptide punches holes in the virus’s cell membrane to destroy the virus – instead of attacking internal chemicals like most modern medicines.

And that’s just one peptide, from one frog. Another peptide — from the giant Mexican leaf frog — has shown promise as a potential treatment for high blood pressure. Yet another peptide from the same frog prevents blood clotting and could help scientists cure deep vein thrombosis and heart disease.

Frog toxins may hold keys to unlocking mysteries about our own bodies. But as frog populations face unexplained and unprecedented declines, what we can learn from frogs depends on how long they will be around.

“There are a lot of exciting things going on,” says Lips about the explosion of frog research. But she worries about the future for frogs. “At this point, we’re just keeping our fingers crossed and hoping for something to come through, because it’s not looking good.”

NATURE introduces you to the unsung heroes in our history in Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History.

The history of chimps in our society is a history unlike any other. We have sent them into space, dressed them in costumes and demanded that they entertain us. Some have been adopted into human families until they “outgrew” their cuteness, many have been used to test our drugs or to help develop our vaccines, others have been infected with our most frightening diseases. While we are mesmerized by their likeness to our species and we have continually found uses for chimps, we never considered what they wanted or needed.

But their side of the story is starting to emerge. And it can be heard at the sanctuaries where many retired chimps now reside. It can be read in their medical records, seen in their mutilated bodies, or sensed through their psychological afflictions. We’ve had a conflicted relationships with chimps in our society but there are some people who want to simplify it. Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History will introduce you to the rescuers at sanctuaries like Fauna Foundation, Save the Chimps, Center for Great Apes. And they are determined to see that the traumatized residents they have saved from a life of confinement and suffering can finally be allowed to feel like chimps.

Update (January 2008): Under a new bill, called the Chimp Haven is Home Act, retired chimpanzees living at Chimp Haven in Keithville, Louisiana would not be able to be removed for medical research. President Bush must sign the bill for it to become law. The bill, introduced by U.S. Rep. Jim McCrery and U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, deletes a provision in standing law that would allow such removal. The CHIMP Act of 2000 established the National Chimpanzee Sanctuary System for chimpanzees retired from use in research. Chimp Haven operates this sanctuary system through a public-private partnership. “The chimpanzees at Chimp Haven have spent their lives in research laboratories helping to improve the lives of all Americans,” McCrery said. “Many of our discoveries in space and medicine are due to chimpanzees. I am proud to help modify the existing law to ensure chimpanzees at Chimp Haven will spend their final years happily.

To order a copy of Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History was originally posted November 2006.

Dr. Edith (Edie) Widder decided she wanted to be a marine biologist when she was just 11 years old. But by the time she was in graduate school studying neurobiology, she had essentially given up the idea of fulfilling her childhood dream because of the lack of job opportunities for scientists in these fields.

Then, a chance encounter with a colony of jellyfish led Widder to her own career path investigating bioluminescence, the generation of light by living things, and building the instruments to study it and other undersea phenomena. One of the most remarkable pieces of equipment designed by Widder, who is now the president and senior scientist at Florida’s Ocean Research & Conservation Association, is the Eye-in-the-Sea, a unique, unobtrusive camera that sits on the sea bottom and records the never-before-seen behavior of marine animals.

How did you get involved in ocean research?

For my Ph.D. thesis I was measuring the electrical activity that triggers light emission from a bioluminescent dinoflagellate. As I was nearing the completion of my degree, my major professor wrote a grant for an instrument for measuring the color of very dim light flashes from bioluminescent animals. Because I have always been attracted to hi-tech instrumentation, I kept tinkering with this instrument, until I became the lab expert. At that point, he suggested I tag along on some marine biology trawling cruises and measure the colors emitted by different bioluminescent organisms. I was thrilled. Suddenly, I was doing what I had always dreamed of doing: going to sea on exploratory expeditions!

Dr. Edith (Edie) Widder inspects the Eye-in-the-Sea

The animals brought up in the nets were fantastic, and their light-producing capabilities were incredible. I was enthralled, but I still didn’t see how I could carve a career out of this new passion. One of the research cruises I participated in was organized by Dr. Bruce Robison — currently at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) — to test a diving suit called WASP, which had been developed for use by the offshore oil industry as a tool for ocean exploration. [The suit is big enough inside that there is a display of dials, gauges, and switches in front of the wearer's face.] I wanted to see for myself what bioluminescence in the depths of the ocean actually looked like, and Bruce gave me that opportunity. But first I had to qualify as a pilot, and one of the requirements was to be able to [screw a bolt into a large metal] shackle underwater using [only the manipulator claws of] the Michelin Man arms of the suit. The trouble was that my arms were too short, so I had to figure out a way to do it by manipulating the claws with my fingertips and switching back and forth between one arm and the other.

My dives in WASP were a life-changing experience. During my first open ocean dive, I went down to 800 feet and turned out the lights. I knew I would see bioluminescence, but I was totally unprepared for how much. It was incredible! There were explosions of light everywhere, like being in the middle of a silent fireworks display.

Were any of those dives especially noteworthy?

During one dive, I was using a light meter to measure the penetration of sunlight in the water. I was at a depth where the sunlight had almost disappeared and I had my head down looking at the red LED readout of the light meter display when suddenly the whole inside of the suit seemed to explode with blue light. It was so bright I could see all the dials and gauges inside the suit without a flashlight. I thought it was an electrical arc from something malfunctioning with the 440V that powered the suit. But it wasn’t electrical; it was biological. I had brushed against one end of a siphonophore chain, a colony of jellyfish more than 30 feet long. [Jellyfish in the subclass Siphonophorae connect into long chains, which can be over 100 feet long.] By bumping it I had stimulated its bioluminescence.

And that’s what got you hooked on ocean research?

Yes. I knew this is what I had to study, and it didn’t matter that there was no clear career path to do it. I had questions … Who’s making the light? How much light? How many organisms? Why? And, most importantly, why aren’t more scientists studying this? … and I wanted answers. I knew how much energy — the currency of life — that was required for an organism to produce light, so my subjective impression was that this has to be one of the most important processes in the ocean.

I’ve spent much of my career working with engineers to design and build the instruments I needed to answer my questions. Along the way I’ve been lucky enough to make some thrilling discoveries about who was making all that light and why, and also about what a useful tool bioluminescence is for figuring out how animals are distributed in the ocean and for monitoring the health of marine ecosystems.

When did you get the idea for Eye-in-the-Sea?

I have made hundreds of dives in submersibles, with each dive holding the promise of seeing an organism or a behavior that no one has ever seen before. But I have always wondered about the animals and behaviors that we’re not seeing because our bright lights and loud thrusters scare them away. So I decided to develop an unobtrusive camera system that used red light — which is invisible to the animals — and that was powered off a battery so that it could be left to sit quietly on the bottom of the ocean. I also wanted to test an idea for an unusual kind of lure that imitated a bioluminescent display I believed might be very attractive to large predators.

How long did it take to develop the system?

I first tried to get funding in 1994. The trouble is that it’s virtually impossible to get a grant unless you can tell the granting agency what you are going to discover. Since I had no idea, it wasn’t funded. I finally put it together with bits and pieces that we had around the lab, and a few small pots of money for different parts of the system. We had the prototype Eye-in-the-Sea developed as a student project for the Harvey Mudd College Engineering Clinic program in the fall of 2000. They produced a desktop version of the camera system. Then I got money from NOAA [the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration] to build the camera housing and the frame, and I got MBARI, where I’m an adjunct, to buy the underwater battery. We used MBARI’s ship and remotely-operated vehicle for preliminary testing of the system in Monterey Canyon in 2002.

What has been the most exciting discovery made by the system?

I had wanted to place the Eye-in-the-Sea at an oasis on the bottom of the ocean, in some site rich with life that was likely to be patrolled by large predators. The first time I got to test the camera at such a place was in 2004, in the north end of the Gulf of Mexico, at an amazing location called the brine pool. This remarkable oasis is an underwater lake of water so salty and dense that it forms a pool on the bottom of the ocean. Methane, bubbling up through the pool, feeds a community of mussels and clams and other organisms that rim the shore. We placed the camera on the edge of the shore and left it there overnight. The first four hours of recordings showed fish swimming in front of the camera, apparently unperturbed by the red lights. Then, after four hours, the electronic jellyfish lure was programmed to come on for the first time. Just 86 seconds after it went into its pinwheel display mode, I recorded a squid over 6 feet long. It was not just any squid, but a squid so new to science that it cannot be placed in any known scientific family! I couldn’t have asked for a better proof of concept.

This August, we had an expedition to the Bahamas. We only had three deployments of the camera system during a nine-day cruise, but it was incredible how much we saw. We observed as many as nine different species of deep-sea shark, including a seven-gill shark, and the never-before-seen behavior of giant six-gill sharks rooting the sediment, presumably to scoop up pill bugs. We know so little about deep-sea sharks, especially about their normal behavior, that these recordings are scientific gold. As humans reach deeper into the ocean to feed a hungry planet, many of these deep dwellers are in danger of being wiped out. Their growth and reproduction are often too slow for them to be fished sustainably. We need to know about their life histories and behaviors in order to protect them.

Also on that cruise we recorded more bioluminescence than I’ve ever seen before with the Eye-in-the-Sea. Especially exciting was a series of displays that seemed to be triggered by the electronic jellyfish lure. It seemed like we were talking to something. We just don’t know what we were saying.

What does the future hold?

It’s going to be amazing when we have the Eye-in-the-Sea installed on the cabled network in Monterey Canyon. We’ll be collecting data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Instead of brief and infrequent glimpses, we are going to have a window into the deep sea that will be open around the clock, for months at a time. There is no telling what we may see.

Do you owe your life to a chimpanzee? Over the last century, millions of people have been able to live longer, healthier lives thanks to the medicines and surgical techniques that were tested on chimpanzees — one of humankind’s closest relatives. Dozens of vaccines, for instance, have been perfected on chimps purposefully infected with diseases such as polio and hepatitis.

And other chimps have helped us make major technological leaps, by testing everything from submarines to spacecrafts to make sure they are safe for human use.

Sadly, chimpanzees have received little thanks for the knowledge they have allowed us to gain. Once their work is over, if they survive, their futures are grim: they often live out their lives — which can last nearly as long as humans’ — in cramped cages or laboratories. As NATURE’s Wisdom of the Wild shows, however, people are increasingly joining a movement to create sanctuaries for these “surplus” animals, allowing them to spend the rest of their long lives with greater dignity and freedom.

One of the leaders of the sanctuary movement is Linda Koebner, an animal behavior researcher who once studied how chimps adapted back to life outside the laboratory, and who now works to place hundreds of surplus research chimps in new homes. In Wisdom of the Wild, we watch as Linda is reunited with some the first chimps she worked with 25 years ago, veterans of medical research later released into a Florida refuge. And the show takes viewers to a new sanctuary she is establishing in Louisiana, where she hopes to realize her dream of creating the nation’s first large-scale chimp haven.

Even as Koebner works, however, debates rage about the fate of surplus chimpanzees. In the United States, several groups have sued the federal government and private laboratories in efforts to reduce the use of wild chimpanzees in research, and move those now stored in laboratories to less restrictive refuges.

In October 1999, for instance, the Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care and the Doris Day Animal League won a long-sought agreement with the Coulston Foundation, a New Mexico research laboratory, to free 21 chimps descended from animals involved in the U.S. space program. The controversy began in 1997, when the U.S. Air Force decided to give 111 of the so-called “space chimps” to the research foundation, which critics charged had compiled a wretched record of violating animal care laws. “It is inconceivable that the Air Force would have given these remarkable creatures to the Coulston Foundation for continued research, rather than retiring them to a sanctuary,” famed chimp researcher Jane Goodall said at the time.

The Coulston Foundation was forced to give up 300 of its 650 chimpanzees, however, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture concluded that the laboratory had mistreated the chimps. The agreement was “a big win for these magnificent animals,” said USDA official Michael V. Dunn when the September 1999 deal was announced. It also made it possible for some “very lucky chimpanzees to move to [a] sanctuary,” notes Liz Clancy Lyons of the Doris Day Animal League.

But other chimp battles are far from over. Congress is considering legislation that would limit the number of chimps used in research. Supporters say the move is needed to reduce the incentive for illegally capturing the animals from the wild, and to prevent research that might harm the apes while returning little useful knowledge.

Opponents of the proposed rules, however, say it could hamstring efforts to find treatments for AIDS and other diseases that urgently need cures. Sometimes, notes one biomedical scientist who works with chimps but declined to be named, “there is simply no alternative to using chimps because they are so closely related to humans, and ethical concerns prevent us from doing some experiments on humans. But we should be treating these animals with great respect and care — after all, sometimes our lives literally depend on them. They provide insights we can gain nowhere else.”

In 1923, Psychobiologist Robert Yerkes purchased two young chimps from a zoo for his own behavioral studies. These two chimps, named Chim and Panzee, would be the first of thousands to be used for the sake of scientific research in the United States. And while internationally, the use of chimps in research has declined over the last decade, in the US, chimps continue to be used in biomedical research. According to the Humane Society of the US, approximately 1300 chimpanzees live in 11 laboratories around the US-making the US chimp population the largest collective chimpanzee colony for biomedical research in the world.

It is a harsh irony that what makes chimps so like humans, makes them such sought-after research subjects. Sharing so much of our biological makeup (99% of DNA, in fact), chimps have been used in the study of infectious diseases, gene therapy, vaccine development, reproduction, language, behavior, even anatomy.

Though they can catch or be infected by nearly all known human infectious diseases, Hepatitis research remains the largest area of chimpanzee use in the US. Nearly one third of chimp research dollars in 2003 and 2004 went to Hepatitis studies. The research has virtually eradicated Hepatitis B and C infections acquired through blood transfusions, though critics of chimp research say the first Hepatitis B vaccine was made from the blood of infected humans.

Introduction What are the alternatives for medical research? Slideshow Interview with Gloria Grow, founder Fauna Sanctuary Caring for Captive Chimps Q and A with the filmmaker Video Links and books Download Wallpaper For Educators In the 1980s, during the height of the HIV and AIDS outbreak, chimps were aggressively bred as subjects for studies of the disease. But this breeding campaign would soon result in thousands of surplus chimps when they were found to be poor models – never developing full-blown AIDS.

Critics of chimp research argue that the case of HIV is not an isolated case of scientific indiscretion. Even in the case of Hepatitis, chimps respond differently from humans. Chimps infected with Hepatitis B will not become sick while humans exhibit traditional symptoms of liver disease. And chimps infected with Hepatitis C will not develop cirrhosis of the liver or liver cancer, though humans will. And in fact, with regard to drug development, 70% of drugs that have tested safe in nonhuman primates are known to be harmful to the human fetus.

Fortunately, science presents some possible solutions. In July of 2005, Hepatitis C researchers reported a breakthrough in the technology to grow the virus entirely in cell culture. And the vaccine for this disease is now made from bacterial culture.

Using human volunteers with a specific illness in clinical trials for new drugs is, say animal research critics, a more accurate and humane alternative to testing drugs in animals like chimps. Today, a great deal of Hepatitis research is successfully carried out through observation and clinical trials on humans with the disease. The perceived risks of participating in trails is getting smaller. In one form of human clinical trial, called micro dosing, human volunteers are given minute doses of an experimental drug too small to even have negative effects on the body. The physiological effects of the drug are then extrapolated using high tech laboratory equipment like a mass spectrometer. This method can be very effective, and was used during clinical trials for drugs to treat AIDS and HIV.

Unfortunately, human studies are expensive to undertake and are limited by a shortage of human volunteers. While it may be some time before they replace testing in animals such as chimps, they can still provide valuable clues as to how different classes of substances elicit their effects, and thus reduce the need for animal testing. They can also provide a much-needed framework for the development of alternatives based on human or animal tissue and cell systems.

In in-vitro testing on human cell cultures and tissues has become an emerging alternative. Conducted on living cells in containers such as a test tube or Petri dish, the method tests the toxicity of substances, essentially “in bulk,” meaning that large numbers of compounds can be screened rapidly and simultaneously in numerous cell lines, rather than in one individual animal. The method is not only much faster than animal tests, it is also more accurate since human cell lines are used. In-vitro studies on human cells and tissues have made possible the investigation of the immune-stimulating effects of potential vaccines and the analysis of HIV transmission.

New research tools and equipment can also provide alternatives to testing in animals such as chimps. By providing scientists with a clearer and more precise understanding of the physiology of disease(s), scientists can monitor actual patients of the disease they are studying at the cellular level. Techniques such as paper chromatography, radioimmunoassay, genetic engineering polymerase chain reaction, and positron emission tomography have all advanced our understanding of biomedical knowledge. Positive emission tomography, for example, can be used to safely and noninvasively examine the activated lymph nodes and spleens of patients given vaccines or to monitor viral infections in a temporal and spatial manner.

Of course, the genomic revolution has equipped scientists with unparalleled tools for engineering “personalized medicine.” Knowing the correlations between human disease and specific genes could allow doctors to prescribe the right drug at the right dose for the right person, based on unique variations in their DNA- not on the DNA of a chimp, or even a mouse.

While some of these techniques are years away, others are already here and in place. But as more viable humane options are uncovered, perhaps testing our drugs on chimps will seem less necessary and less ethical. And we can finally release chimps from their role as research subjects in our society.

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Television Credits

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The Jane Goodall Institute
http://www.janegoodall.org
Includes basic biographical information on Jane Goodall and chimp-related links.

Discover Chimpanzees
http://www.discoverchimpanzees.org
The home page of the Jane Goodall Institute’s Center for Primate Studies.

Primate Image Collection
http://www.primate.wisc.edu/pin/images/chimps.html
Chimpanzee images from the Audiovisual Archive Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center.

C.H.I.M.P.P. Homepage
http://jinrui.zool.kyoto-u.ac.jp/CHIMPP/CHIMPP.html
A paper on C.H.I.M.P.P., or Chemo-Ethology of Hominoid Interactions with Medicinal Plants and Parasites, discussing whether chimps intentionally eat medicinal plants when sick.

Chimpanzee Hunting Behavior and Human Evolution
http://www.amsci.org/amsci/articles/95articles/Stanford-full.html
A paper about chimp hunting habits that appeared in AMERICAN SCIENTIST.

Gombe Stream National Park Information
http://www.tanzania-web.com/parks/gombe.htm
Fact sheet on the park, including how to get there and what to expect.

Books

De Waal, Frans. CHIMPANZEE POLITICS: POWER AND SEX AMONG APES. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989

Ferber, Elizabeth. JANE GOODALL: A LIFE WITH ANIMALS. London: Marshall Cavendish, 1997.

Fouts, Roger, and Stephen Tukel Mills. NEXT OF KIN: WHAT CHIMPANZEES HAVE TAUGHT ME ABOUT WHO WE ARE. New York: William Morrow, 1997.

Goodall, Jane. IN THE SHADOW OF MAN. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

Goodall, Jane. THROUGH A WINDOW: MY THIRTY YEARS WITH THE CHIMPANZEES OF GOMBE. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Goodall, Jane and Alan Marks. WITH LOVE: TEN HEARTWARMING STORIES OF CHIMPANZEES IN THE WILD. New York: North South Books, 1998.

Goodall, Jane and Michael Neugebauer. THE CHIMPANZEE FAMILY BOOK. New York: North South Books, 1997.

Peterson, Dale and Jane Goodall. VISIONS OF CALIBAN: ON CHIMPANZEES AND PEOPLE. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Pratt, Paul and Paula Bryant Pratt. THE IMPORTANCE OF JANE GOODALL. London: Lucent Books, 1997.

When Jane Goodall arrived there in 1960, Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park was just one parcel of forest amidst a vast sea of trees. Today, however, as shown in JANE GOODALL’S WILD CHIMPANZEES, it is a small green island engulfed by farms, fields, and villages. Despite the change, this park (at a mere 20 square miles, Tanzania’s smallest) is still one of the best places in the world to see wild chimpanzees in their natural habitat.

The park, located near the Burundi border on the world’s longest lake, Lake Tanganyika, is rich in both human and natural history. Nearby is the village of Ujiji, where historians believe British researcher H.M. Stanley uttered the famous words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” in 1871 upon encountering fellow adventurer David Livingstone, who had been believed dead. Livingstone, though seriously ill, convinced Stanley to join him on a search for the source of the Nile — a quest that took them through the Gombe Valley.

Today, the park is reachable only by tramp steamer. It is best visited during the dry season, which stretches from May to October. If you visit, park officials warn, be aware that overnight facilities are rugged and camping is restricted in order to protect visitors from the danger posed by aggressive baboons. Travelers willing to put up with such challenges, however, are sure to be rewarded with glimpses of wildlife.

The park’s steep, narrow valleys, carpeted by evergreen rainforests that give way to alpine bamboo stands and grass-topped ridges, are home to two kinds of acrobatic colobus monkeys, along with bushpigs, giant kingfishers, crowned eagles, trumpeter hornbills, and more than 50 other wild species. Snorkellers may enjoy the adjoining lake, which holds almost 100 kinds of brightly-colored cichlid fish. However, visitors eager to get as close to the chimps as Goodall does should know that it is not safe for strangers to approach the apes without a trained guide. And be sure to leave your best clothes behind: observers sitting beneath feeding chimps can expect to be the targets of less than sanitary showers!

While we may believe that we have nothing but ancestors in common with our primate relatives, Jane Goodall’s research into chimpanzee behavior shows that, in areas from warfare to parenting, our two species are closely linked. For example, she found that, like us, chimpanzees create tools to make their lives easier — such as the carefully chosen grass stems used to “fish” for tasty insects, as shown in this NATURE program.

Goodall followed up this discovery with stunning evidence that the seemingly peaceful chimpanzees in fact systematically hunted smaller primates, such as colobus monkeys, for meat: one such hunt is grippingly documented on NATURE. In addition to killing for food, Goodall also found that some female chimps also kill the young of other females in their own troops in an effort to maintain dominance.

But aggression is only part of chimp life. Goodall has also documented affectionate touching instantly recognizable to people: hugs, kisses, pats on the back, even tickles. “They show gestures that we’re so familiar with,” Goodall noted in a recent speech to the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

These caresses are evidence, she said, of “the close, supportive, affectionate bonds that develop between family members and other individuals within a community, which can persist throughout a life span of more than 50 years.”

Goodall’s research “has far-reaching implications that have revolutionized the fields of observation biology and conservation,” says Dr. Robert Sullivan, who chairs the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, a $150,000 award that Goodall and two other primate researchers shared in 1997. In particular, say scientists, Goodall’s practice of following individual chimps for decades has yielded an unprecedented wealth of information for current researchers.

In 1997, for instance, University of Minnesota researchers Anne Pusey and Jennifer Williams used 25 years’ worth of data from Goodall’s project to show, for the first time, that higher-ranking female chimpanzees do indeed produce more offspring than their lower-ranking troopmates.

The researchers were able to confirm this long-debated idea only because Goodall’s project has consistently documented the reproductive success of specific females, including groundbreaking work on their use of “pant-grunts,” chimp sounds that indicate rank. Apparently, higher-ranking chimps get better access to food, and that translates into increased survival rates for their young.

Goodall’s Gombe data have also led researchers to take a closer look at the role that hunting plays in chimp feeding habits. One recent Gombe study, for instance, concluded that the 45 members of one troop ate a ton of monkey meat per year. During one hunting binge, chimps killed 71 colobus monkeys in 68 days; one chimp alone killed 42 monkeys over five years. All told, chimps may kill and eat a third of the Gombe’s colobus population each year. Researchers have also found that lower-ranking males often trade the meat for mating privileges; such trades may help prevent inbreeding by keeping a single group of males from fathering the majority of a troop’s children.

Goodall’s legacy has especially inspired women, like Minnesota’s Pusey and Williams, to become biologists. She lectures relentlessly in an effort to get young girls and boys involved in understanding and protecting chimps and other wild animals. “If children get education, they are more likely to spread the word about conservation,” Goodall says.