More on the Fongoli chimps and Dr. Jill Preutz

Telling the chimps' stories
From the Des Moines Register
By MIKE KILEN

Jill 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. "My work defines my life to a great extent. For better or worse, it takes up almost all of my time and much of my energy," Pruetz says.

Pruetz is an anthropology professor at ISU but her heart is with the chimps, a species much more closely tied to humans than any other. The highlight of her life was saving an infant chimp last year. The highlight of her professional life was the first observation of chimps using tools to hunt, a finding that circled the globe two years ago. She is the "most widely talked about" chimp researcher since Jane Goodall, wrote National Geographic Magazine two years ago. In April, Pruetz was featured in a National Geographic Channel documentary which will air again later in the year. "Anyone that is mentioned in the same breath as Jane Goodall will acknowledge there can never be another Jane Goodall," Pruetz says, calling Goodall's 1986 book on chimpanzee behavior the best. "I find it incredibly flattering."

When Pruetz is back in Iowa, she thinks about the chimps. Flanking her computer is a large cutout of a chimp she named Frito, one of the group of 30 she studies in Fongoli, Senegal. A cartoon bubble juts from his mouth with the words "Thinking of you." She fears he may be dead. The word has come from research assistants in Senegal. "Having a chimp die that I really care about is depressing and makes me want to distance myself from my chimp subjects," she says. "But I eventually move on."

The National Geographic Society has awarded her five grants for the study primarily because of her skills as a scientist, said John Francis, its vice president of research. "But if you can tell a good story about it afterwards," he adds, "that is icing on the cake." And Pruetz has some stories.

The night before she returned to Iowa this spring, she slept in the field and dreamed of a dog biting her leg. She awoke fearing it was hyenas. The work has numerous potential dangers. Chimps are five times as strong as humans and if they knew it, she would be in trouble. Pruetz observes from just 30 feet away, close enough to be near the group but far enough to not intervene. Recently, a new alpha male in the group was in the midst of a display to show his dominance. A display involves loud calls and frightening faces, dragging around branches and generally scaring the others. He turned to Pruetz. She thought, it couldn't be that bad. "But when he displayed at me, holy wow, that was scary," she said. "I felt like I should act frightened just because he deserved it. You can't do that, so I just stayed silent."

Yet she is fiercely protective of the chimps, declining in numbers like other great apes worldwide. "It is her life," said her mother, Dorothy Pruetz, from Yoakum, Texas. "The chimps have become her family." Pruetz grew up in Texas, was reading by age 3 and became the first in her family to graduate from college. She also ran track at Texas State. "You never told Jill Pruetz what to do. She would tell you what she was going to do, and you better watch out," her mother said.

The sinewy professor looks younger than her years and talks like an excited undergrad about the first time she saw a great ape after studying the blank stares of monkeys. It looked at her with a kind of understanding in its eyes. She was hooked. Pruetz was awarded grants to study a group of savanna chimps in Senegal in 2001, three months before she joined the ISU staff. The chimps live mostly on the ground, unlike chimps elsewhere, and are hard to study, ranging in a wide area. She would catch a glimpse and not see them for 10 days. Pruetz figured it would take 10 years just to "habituate," or get the chimps used to her presence without scurrying. It took only four years. "I wore them down," she said. "I knew I could because I never give up." The male-dominated culture in Senegal, where men and women eat separately and afternoon teas last three hours, was at first difficult. Pruetz prefers the field in constant 100-degree temperatures to the mud hut home and drop toilet shared with other villagers. The amazing things happening in the field, especially one day in 2006, explain why.

A female chimp named Tumbo sharpened a branch and wielded it like a spear. "What is going on?" Pruetz thought then. "What is she going to do with it?" Tumbo used it to stab a bush baby, a small, tree-dwelling primate. She was hunting. Over 17 days, Pruetz saw them hunt bush babies 13 times, followed by more occurrences in 2007. She recorded it in dozens of waterproof journals that line her office. This link to human behavior fascinated lay people and earned immediate reaction in the science community. Critics surfaced who didn't think the sample was large enough. Others thought chimps couldn't do such a thing. Since then, she has documented 90 uses of hunting tools among the chimps. Pruetz shrugged it off as the nature of science. The disagreements also made a good story for the media. Her name was suddenly everywhere. But the more she watched the chimps, the more her interest changed to their social behavior. And that is her best story.

While back at Iowa State in January 2009, she got a call from a research assistant in Africa. A hunter had gathered one of the baby chimps she had named Aimee and was trying to sell it. Pruetz used money from teaching an online course, bought a $1,400 plane ticket and flew to Africa. They convinced the hunter to give Aimee back, tended to the wounded chimp and gently placed her out in the field. Pruetz was scared of aggression by males or that the mother had been killed, as typically happens when a baby is taken. Then they saw an orphan adolescent male named Mike approach. He paced around Aimee and sniffed. Then he scooped her up and took her back to Aimee's pant-grunt greetings to the others. The mother had been injured so Mike carried Aimee around for two days before she came to her baby. Aimee would live. And Pruetz had recorded another rarity, altruistic behavior from an unrelated adolescent male. "Seeing that infant reunited with her mother was more fulfilling than anything I have done before," Pruetz said. "I can't imagine anything being more fulfilling than that moment." She knew questions would arise from researchers about intervening with subjects and from students about the dangers of anthropomorphizing. In the interview on National Geographic Television, she had to pause to cry when talking of Aimee. "We all struggle with it. But what I tell students is, try to be objective but acknowledge that we all have our favorites," she said. When she speaks of Aimee or Frito, there is a catch in her voice.

So conservation has become a more important subject to Pruetz. She says these chimps may not be around in 20 years. Iron and gold miners are moving in. She is also working on a paper on altruism among the chimps as her interest grows in the emotional similarities to humans, raising questions on how we define and separate ourselves from animals. Pruetz says she will likely do this work forever, despite creaking knees from years of running and the long separations from family and friends. "It's so amazingly peaceful," she says. "I'm glad to come home, but I can't wait to go back."

Related link: Must See! - Dr. Preutz reintroduces captured chimp back into Fongoli research group

Must See! - Dr. Preutz reintroduces captured chimp back into Fongoli research group

from National Geographic:
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.

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.

The Fongoli chimps -- named after a river that runs through their range -- were made media stars by Pruetz.

In 2007 she and colleagues reported that, for the first time, great apes -- the Fongoli chimps in Senegal -- had been observed making and using tools to hunt mammals. The research was funded in part by the National Geographic Society and was featured in National Geographic Magazine and in a NOVA/National Geographic Television documentary.

Also in 2007, Pruetz reported that the Fongoli chimpanzees take shelter from the scorching heat in caves. "The discovery has raised chatter among primate researchers, who say it's the first known case of regular cave use by an ape species," National Geographic News reported.

In recognition of her pioneering work, Pruetz was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer last year.

So when Pruetz sent out her urgent email on Sunday, many people were naturally concerned.

She gave me permission to run her email of today on my blog -- and I can think of no better way to relate the story than in her own words.

From Jill Pruetz in Senegal, West Africa, January 29, 2009:

I am happy to give you the wonderful news that baby has been delivered back to mom. It turns out that the infant was Aimee, Tia's first baby.

Tia is one of the top bushbaby hunters at Fongoli too. Aimee is only nine months old, so wouldn't have been able to survive in the group if Tia had been killed.

Briefly, I arrived in Kedougou Tuesday night just before midnight and slept in the hut next to the baby's cage. She vocalized a few times during the night and I tried to reciprocate, which worked I think, as she slept a little while every time, but I stayed awake for hours, of course, worrying about her!

She went to sleep finally, and Johnny and I left the next morning at 5am to go out to try and find chimps. He had stayed in Kedougou with the baby, as he was afraid to leave her in [the] charge of others there -- which is a good thing given she is so young and would normally nurse maybe once an hour.

But we didn't know exactly where the chimps were -- although we had a general idea given what Michel, my other field assistant, told us of their ranging habits of late.

Johnny and I went out and found a large party of about 15, with a female with no infant (all but one of the females in our group carry infants currently). It was Tia, and she was wounded, as the guys had described.

Johnny stayed with the chimps and I literally jogged back to camp and carried the baby out -- the chimps were about 2 kilometers from camp.

My other field assistant Michel carried my gear and I carried Aimee. We put her in a sack when we got close to the chimps because we wanted to leave her and move away so the chimps wouldn't see us with the baby -- we were afraid they would attack us upon seeing we had the baby.

The baby was so small and understandably confused, though, that she didn't vocalize when she heard the chimps, so we ended up all three walking together with the bag to within about 30 feet of the chimp party feeding in a fig tree. We put the bag down and opened it and backed away about 25 feet.

Mike, an adolescent whose own mother disappeared soon after he was weaned, came down and approached the baby, who just sat in the sack and looked from us to the chimps. He looked at her and smelled her and then picked her up and took her to the tree where her mother, Tia, raced down and retrieved her!

I followed them for the rest of the day and baby seemed to do fine. She was nursing and even played a little with her mother. She didn't move more than an arm's length from Tia for most of the day -- she had one hand on her at all times!

Later on in the day, when the party began to travel, Tia ended up last, stopping frequently to worry over her wound, which attracted a lot of flies. Each time, she would set the baby down.

Finally, Mike -- the adolescent who went and retrieved Aimee in the first place -- picked up the baby and carried her for Tia for the next 15 minutes!

Tia took the baby back when they reached a spot where the whole group fed, and they slept not very far from there.

The last time I saw them yesterday, Tia was feeding on Keno flowers and Aimee was sitting about a foot from her. The chimps slept there, and my assistant Michel is following them today, and keeping an eye on Tia and Aimee.

I came into town to talk to the Forestry Department officials about this problem as well as projects we are either currently working on or would like to implement specifically about conservation.

It turns out that the people who captured Aimee were two high-school age young men who live in Kedougou but routinely go out to the woodlands in the southern part of the chimps' range to hunt warthogs, etc. with their dogs.

I can write more about this problem and our efforts to solve it later, but I don't want to dwell on that side of things today -- I really just wanted to fill you in on the details of the miraculous return of Aimee. I don't know if this has ever happened before, but the likelihood of a baby chimpanzee actually being returned to its mother like this has to be pretty rare occurrence, especially given the fact that the mother is most often killed in the process. In fact, I can hardly believe it myself.

Most of the credit has to go to Johnny Kante. He fed Aimee every time she vocalized! He would make a great chimp mom, I told him!

Thanks to Cleve H for the link

Wild chimps can predict movement of wildfires

From the Iowa State University website
Wild chimps have near human understanding of fire, says study by ISU's Pruetz

AMES, Iowa -- The use and control of fire are behavioral characteristics that distinguish humans from other animals. Now, a new study by Iowa State University anthropologist Jill Pruetz reports that savanna chimpanzees in Senegal have a near human understanding of wildfires and change their behavior in anticipation of the fire's movement.

An ISU associate professor of anthropology, Pruetz and Thomas LaDuke, an associate professor of biological sciences at East Stroudsburg (Pa.) University, co-authored the paper, which will be posted online Friday by the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. It will be published in a 2010 edition of the journal.

Data on the chimps' behavior with seasonal fires was collected by Pruetz during two specific encounters in March and April 2006. She reports that wildfires are set yearly by humans for land clearing and hunting, and most areas within the chimpanzees' home range experience burning to some degree.
Chimps have calm understanding of wildfires

The researchers interpret the chimpanzees' behavior to the wildfires as being predictive, rather than responsive, in that they showed no signals of stress or fear -- other than avoiding the fire as it approached them.

"It was the end of the dry season, so the fires burn so hot and burn up trees really fast, and they [the chimps] were so calm about it. They were a lot better than I was, that's for sure," said Pruetz, who was selected a 2008 National Geographic Emerging Explorer for her previous research on the savanna chimpanzees at the Fongoli research site in Senegal.

"They [the chimps] were experts at predicting where it was going to go," she continued. "I could predict it, sort of, but if it were just me, I would have left. At one time, I actually had to push through them because I could feel the heat from the fire that was on the side of me and I just wasn't that comfortable with it."

Pruetz says it was hard to find previous research on how other animals interacted with fire. But the few examples that she and LaDuke found -- such as elephants' encounters with similar wildfires -- reported that those animals were highly stressed and experienced high mortality rates.

In their paper, the researchers wrote that the control of fire by humans involves the acquisition of these three cognitive stages:
1. Conceptualization of fire. An understanding of the behavior under varying conditions that would allow one to predict its movement, thus permitting activity in close proximity to the fire.
2. The ability to control fire. Involving containment, providing or depriving the fire of fuel and perhaps the ability to put it out.
3. The ability to start a fire.

According to Pruetz, the Fongoli chimpanzees have mastered the first stage, which is the prerequisite to the other two. But she doesn't see them figuring out how to start a fire anytime soon -- at least, not without help.

"I think they could learn. It might be difficult only because of their dexterity, since they're less dexterous than us," she said. "But naturally, I can't ever see them making fire. I think cognitively they are able to control it (stage 2)."
Displaying a new "fire dance"

Yet they are very aware of fire and its power. In fact, Pruetz reports that the chimps have developed a unique "fire dance."

"Chimps everywhere have what is called a 'rain dance' -- Jane Goodall (a famed primatologist) coined that term -- and it's just a big male display (to show dominance)," she said. "Males display all the time for a number of different reasons, but when there's a big thunderstorm approaching, they do this real exaggerated display -- it's almost like slow motion. And when I was with this one party of chimps, the dominant male did the same sort of thing, but it was towards the fire, so I call it the fire dance.

"The other interesting thing was that I heard a vocalization that I never heard before [the fire dance] and I've never heard since," Pruetz continued.

She says the study provides insight into how the earliest human ancestors first developed the ability to control fire.

"If chimps can understand and predict the movement of fire, then maybe that's the thing that allowed some of the very earliest bipedal apes [human ancestors] to eventually be able to control fire," she said.

Pruetz will be continuing her research in Senegal during the spring semester. It is sponsored, in part, by the National Geographic Society, in addition to Iowa State.

Jill Pruetz, an ISU associate professor of anthropology, has been studying savanna chimpanzees at her Fongoli research site in Senegal since 2001. Her new study documents how the chimps understand the fire they encounter in the region. For contact info please visit the iowa state news website