Filming chimpanzees in the wild is tough

Discovery has a nice little video about filming chimpanzees for the miniseries "Life". They mention Tatyana Humle and Guinea, so I think the footage is from Bossou. It shows how hard it is to film and study wild chimpanzees and I also like that it shows how field sites are now making face masks mandatory to reduce zoonotic disease transmission. It makes the work harder but so much safer for the apes. -MA

video at: http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/life-filming-chimpanzees.html

Chimps seek out and de-arm snares in Bossou, Guinea

"Waller" lost his hand after it was trapped in a snare, Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda.
Picture courtesy of Kevin Langergraber.

From the BBC (thanks to Cleve H and Dieter L for the link!)
Wild chimps outwit human hunters
By MATT WALKER

Wild chimpanzees are learning how to outwit human hunters. Across Africa, people often lay snare traps to catch bushmeat, killing or injuring chimps and other wildlife. But a few chimps living in the rainforests of Guinea have learnt to recognise these snare traps laid by human hunters, researchers have found. More astonishing, the chimps actively seek out and intentionally deactivate the traps, setting them off without being harmed. The discovery was serendipitously made by primatologists Mr Gaku Ohashi and Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa who were following chimps living in Bossou, Guinea to study the apes' social behaviour.

Snare injuries to chimps are reported at many sites across east and west Africa where chimps are studied, with many animals dying in the traps. However, very few snares injuries have been reported among chimps studied at Bossou, which is unusual as the chimps live close to human settlements and snares are commonly laid in the area.

Now primatologists know why.

While researching the chimps, Mr Ohashi and Prof Matsuzawa, of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University, Japan, observed five male chimps, both juvenile and adult, attempting to break and deactivate snares. On two occasions witnessed, the chimps successfully deactivated the traps set for them.

Wire noose
A typical snare, for example one made by the Manon people of Bossou, consists of a loop of iron wire connected by a vine rope to an arched stick, often a sapling. The sapling puts tension into the rope and once an animal passes through the wire loop, the trap is sprung and the sapling pulls it tight, around the neck or leg of an animal. Such traps cause indiscriminate damage, ensnaring any and all animals that come into contact with them.

But male Bossou chimps have worked out how to outwit the hunters and deactivate the traps. "They seemed to know which parts of the snares are dangerous and which are not," Mr Ohashi told the BBC.

In the journal Primates, the researchers describe six separate cases where chimps were observed trying to deactivate snares. Mostly, the chimps grasped the snare stick with their hands, shaking it violently until the trap broke. Sometimes a chimp lightly knocked the sapling that holds the snare, before grasping it to break the trap. But in all cases, they avoided touching the dangerous part, the wire loop.

Life-saving skills
"We were surprised when we found this behaviour," says Mr Ohashi. "This is the first report of chimpanzees breaking snares without injury." The chimps' actions may also reveal something important about how chimps learn. Often, chimps acquire new talents by trial and error. For example, when trying to crack nuts, they might strike one stone onto an anvil stone and miss the nuts all together. Or they might use their hands to strike the nut, which is ineffective. But the Bossou chips couldn't have learned how to deactivate the snares this way, as one mistake could be fatal. "The observations indicate that chimpanzees can learn some manners without trial and error," says Mr Ohashi.

The researchers speculate that the chimps may have learnt how the snares work by observing them over time, and this information has been passed down generations. During one case, a juvenile male watched an adult male deactivate a snare, before then moving in to handle it once it was safe.

The researchers caution that snares remain a significant threat to wild chimps, and they are leading conservation efforts to scan the forest for the traps and remove them. They also say that chimps in other regions do not appear so far to have also learnt how to outwit human hunters in this way.

--
Reference:
Ohashi G and Matsuzawa T (2010) Deactivation of snares by wild chimpanzees. Primates
DOI: 10.1007/s10329-010-0212-8

Abstract
Snare injuries to chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have been reported at many study sites across Africa, and in some cases cause the death of the ensnared animal. However, very few snare injuries have been reported concerning the chimpanzees of Bossou, Guinea. The rarity of snare injuries in this study group warrants further consideration, given the exceptionally close proximity of the Bossou chimpanzees to human settlements and the widespread practice of snare hunting in the area. Herein we report a total of six observations of chimpanzees attempting to break and deactivate snares, successfully doing so on two of these occasions. We observed the behavior in 5 males, ranging in age from juveniles to adults. We argue that such active responses to snares must be contributing to the rarity of injuries in this group. Based on our observations, we suggest that the behavior has transmitted down the group. Our research team at Bossou continues to remove snares from the forest, but the threat of ensnarement still remains. We discuss potential ways to achieve a good balance between human subsistence activities and the conservation of chimpanzees at Bossou, which will increasingly be an area of great concern in the future.

Dr. Matsuzawa spearheads reforestation project between Bossou and Nimba Mountains (Guinea)

from USAtoday.com
Scientists building Green Corridor to connect fading chimps colony to nearby mountains
By Elizabeth Weise

The chimpanzees in the Bossou, Guinea community described in today's article face dangers other than simple respiratory epidemics -- though the one that killed the two infants described in a paper in this week's edition of the journal Current Biology did wipe out five of them, more than a quarter of the population.

Dora Biro, one of the Oxford University zoologists who does field work watching the group, says their concern is that it is so small that the group will eventually die out. There are only 13 chimpanzees in the community today, she says.

Their numbers are so small because "the core range of this community consists of three hills and everywhere around it is savanna." Chimps don't like to cross open savanna, so they're effectively penned in on their little 'island' of trees.

But just three and a half miles away is "a huge mountain range full of chimpanzees." Chimps naturally move out of their birth group and into others as they mature, so it would be normal for the Bossou group to continually get an influx of new members from other troupes. But the distance, and the danger, is too great.

However, the Japanese team of biologists who originally established the observation site have now begun to plant a corridor of trees across the savanna to try to connect the Bossou 'island' of hills to the nearby Nimba mountain range where the other chimpanzees live.

"The trees still need to grow before they're at all passable for chimps," says Biro. "The idea is if this corridor does work, if the trees survive, it will give chimps access both in and out, and that could save the community."

It's called The Green Corridor Project and it's being spearheaded by Tetsuro Matsuzawa, who helped establish the site.

For more information visit GreenPassage.org

Chimps use cleavers to chop food

By Matt Walker
From BBC Earth News

For the first time, chimpanzees have been seen using tools to chop up and reduce food into smaller bite-sized portions. Chimps in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea, Africa, use both stone and wooden cleavers, as well as stone anvils, to process Treculia fruits.The apes are not simply cracking into the Treculia to get to otherwise unobtainable food, say researchers.Instead, they are actively chopping up the food into more manageable portions. Observations of the behaviour are published in the journal Primates.
 
PhD student Kathelijne Koops and Professor William McGrew of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, University of Cambridge, UK, studied a group of chimps living wild in the Nimba Mountains. Ms Koops research is focused on the use by the chimps of elementary technology, such as the use of tools while foraging. "Chimpanzees across Africa vary greatly in the types of tools they use to obtain food. Some groups use stones as hammers and anvils to crack open nuts, whereas others use twigs to fish for termites," she says. The apes' use of such tools can be surprisingly sophisticated. "For example, nut-cracking in the Bossou chimpanzee community in Guinea involves the use of a movable hammer and anvil, and sometimes the additional use of stabilising wedges to make the anvil more level and so more efficient," explains Ms Koops. "Termite fishing in some chimpanzee communities in the Republic of Congo involves the use of a tool set, i.e. different tool components used sequentially to achieve the same goal. "These chimpanzees were found to deliberately modify termite fishing probes by creating a brush-end, before using them to fish for termites."


But together with Prof McGrew and Prof Tetsuro Matsuzawa of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University in Japan, Ms Koops has discovered another startling use of tools not previously recorded. During a monthly survey of chimps ( Pan troglodytes ) living in the mountain forests, she came across stone and rocks that had clearly be used by the apes to process Treculia fruits. These fruits, which can be the size of a volleyball and weigh up to 8.5kg, are hard and fibrous.But despite lacking a hard outer shell, they are too big for a chimpanzee to get its jaws around and bite into. So, instead, the chimps use a range of tools to chop them into smaller pieces.

Ms Koops found stone and wooden cleavers, as well as stone anvils used to fracture the large fruits.All were covered by the remains of smashed fruit and seeds.The cleavers were clearly used to pound the fruit, rather than the fruit pounded upon the stones.And the anvils were made from immoveable rocky outcrops.

This is the first account of chimpanzees using a pounding tool technology to break down large food items into bite-sized chunks rather than just extract it from other unobtainable sources such as baobab nuts, Ms Koops told the BBC. "And it's the first time wild chimpanzees have been found to use two distinct types of percussive technology, i.e. movable cleavers versus a non-movable anvil, to achieve the same goal." Surprisingly, neighbouring chimps living in the nearby region of Seringbara do not process their food in this way, reinforcing how tool use among apes is culturally learnt.

Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8427000/8427974.stm