Since I have been really terrible at updating the blog (but pretty good at keeping up with the facebook blog posts) I've added the widget below so that facebook cross posts to the blog.
You shouldn't need to join facebook but can just click on the links in the widget to access the articles. If you have any problems or comments please mail me at arandjel 'AT' eva.mpg.de.
Disney's Chimpanzee has come out in theaters! The movie was primarily filmed in Ivory Coast with the habituated chimps from the Tai Chimpanzee Project and partially with the chimpanzees from the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project and the story is about the orphan adoption by an unrelated male in Tai's East Group :)
I am so proud of so many of my colleagues from the MPI (Tai Chimpanzee and Ngogo Chimpanzee Projects) that helped make the movie 'Chimpanzee' possible. (& thanks to Carly O for the screen snap from the movie :) )
Also, I LOVE Jane Goodall and here is an interview she did about the movie 'Chimpanzee' on the Daily Show. It was a little disappointing she didn't promote the chimpanzees actually featured in the movie (the chimpanzees of the Tai (Ivory Coast) and Kibale (Uganda) forests) or the NGOs that represent them, but if you want to help wild chimpanzee conservation please consider donating to the WILD CHIMPANZEE FOUNDATION or the NGOGO CHIMPANZEE PROJECTs.
From the Global Post by Laura Burke Conservationists are working to keep endangered chimpanzees alive and wild.
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — On a humid October day in a tropical forest in the middle of Abidjan, members of Ymako Theatri theater group, dressed in black suits, jump to the beat of drums and sing: "Chimpan-zees are our cou-sins! Let’s not eat them any-more! Let’s not kill them any-more!"
The rhythm is catchy and the performers are energized, singing: "We must protect the forest for the future of our children!"
Today, like always, the audience is rapt.
The long-established international theater and dance troupe has been working with the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation since 2002 to hammer home a message of conservation in villages around national parks in Ivory Coast and beyond.
It’s a message this country can use.
Years of armed conflict, population growth and a lack of park management has resulted in a free-for-all environment in Ivory Coast's parks and reserves, said Inza Koné, this nation’s only homegrown primatologist. He runs a local organization called Research and Action to Save Primates in Ivory Coast.
Ivory Coast's chimpanzee population declined by 90 percent over a period of 17 years, according to a 2008 report by the German Max-Planck Institute. The ape is now critically endangered.
Many international conservation groups, including World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, withdrew their offices from Ivory Coast after the 2002 civil war began, deeming the security situation too dangerous to work there, and they have not returned.
“Wildlife Conservation Society had one resource person here and he died two or three years ago. They could not find a single person to replace him. Not a single person,” Koné said.
But in Tai National Park, a small group of conservationists, primatologists and local field officers have weathered moments of crisis to keep the park’s chimpanzees protected from poachers and deforestation.
“[Tai] is the model for Ivory Coast,” said parks official Djé Francois N’goran.
Their efforts seem to have paid off. The chimp population in Tai remained stable from 2007 through 2010, said Dervla Dowd, deputy director of the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation.
Data from the last tumultuous year is not in yet, though.
Last November, after Ivory Coast’s former president Laurent Gbagbo refused to leave office following a contested election, the country was plunged into six months of violence that killed thousands of people, many in the west. Park rangers left their posts for months. During their absence, poaching rose sharply in parks across the country, N’goran said.
Koné said when his team returned to Tai there were also signs that poaching had increased.
“We found gun shells and heard gunshots. We saw campsites around the park,” he said.
Field officers reported seeing a couple of chimps in the [bush meat] markets, “but since there are so few chimps left, they are hard for poachers to find, as well,” said Dowd.
But she remains optimistic. At least “the field assistants were able to find all the habituated chimps [in the research area],” she said.
Just miles from the often volatile Liberian border, in Ivory Coast’s southwest, the Tai National Park is the home of some 500 chimpanzees and other threatened species, like forest elephants, the pygmy hippopotamus and the red colobus monkey. The park is the largest protected tropical forest in West Africa and a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The Wild Chimpanzee Foundation and the Tai Chimpanzee Project, both started by German primatologist Christophe Boesch, carry out bio-monitoring, behavioral research and community outreach around the park. Boesch began his research in the Tai forest in 1979 and lived there for 12 years.
There are four sub-species of chimpanzee in Africa and they have different behaviors, said Emmanuelle Normand, director of the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation.
“Even within each sub-species there are different cultures. The way they make tools, eat termites, for example.”
From Sciencemag.org Animals Find Sanctuary With Scientists by REBECCA KESSLER
In an 85-square-kilometer swath of rainforest in Côte d'Ivoire's Taï National Park, monkeys call to one another, chimps drum on tree trunks, and tiny antelopes rustle through the underbrush. That's where researchers have been studying primate communities for more than 3 decades. Step outside the research zone, though, and the animal sounds fall silent. The forest is noticeably emptier as a result of heavy poaching. Field researchers all over the world have noticed that long-term research sites double as sanctuaries, but they've never had the numbers to prove it. Now they do.
In 1979, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, established a research site within Taï National Park to study chimpanzees, and a decade later another group began studying monkeys nearby. Back then, the entire park was teeming with animals, says Geneviève Campbell, a graduate student in primatology at Max Planck, but illegal hunting has since been on the rise. As in many parts of Africa, there are few rangers and little money for extensive patrols, and poachers operate with impunity throughout much of the park, Campbell says. Studies have shown that tourist traffic deters poachers, who may steer clear of other people in part to avoid getting caught. But nothing of the sort had been documented for researchers.
For the present study, published online today in Biology Letters, Campbell and several colleagues established 75-kilometer-long study transects, or temporary flagged paths. They spaced the transects evenly throughout a 200-square-kilometer area that encompassed most of the long-term research area, where the chimpanzee and monkey projects are located, and adjacent park forest. The researchers walked each transect three times during an 11-month period, tallying the primates and duikers—small antelopes—that poachers target, as well as evidence of their presence, such as chimp nests and duiker dung. They also recorded signs of poaching, such as campsites, traps, and empty gun cartridges.
They fed the numbers into a computer model to test whether distance from the research area, density of people, forest type, or distance to the park border best predicted the presence of animals and signs of poaching. Sure enough, distance from the research area was the only consistent and significant predictor. There were at least six times more animals near and within the research area than farther outside. The researchers found almost no signs of poaching within and around most of the area and up to 15 times as many signs outside it.
"Now people can at least say with certainty that their presence [has] a positive effect," Campbell says. She hopes the study will provide researchers with ammunition when they seek funding for long-term work in heavily poached areas. These have become a grim reality in many places, and even researchers more interested in behavior than conservation are realizing that they need to get involved. "All the primate populations are threatened," Campbell says. Even for researchers who are not conservation-minded, she says, "if their study animals are dying, they cannot continue their research."
Joshua Linder, a biological anthropologist with James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, says he's noticed the protective effect of long-term research sites in Cameroon, where he studies primates and the bushmeat trade. Linder says he appreciates the confirmation provided by the paper and has no doubt that it will be cited in many grant applications and papers. But whether it will burst open the funding gates is another question. "It's really, really hard to get long-term funding," Linder says. "I don't know if that's all of a sudden going to change because of this article."
Fabian Leendertz, a wildlife veterinarian with the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, runs the veterinary program for the Taï chimpanzee research project and has worked with the monkey project. In a 2008 paper, he and colleagues documented the transmission of viral respiratory disease from people to chimpanzees living in the Taï research area, highlighting research's possible negative consequences. But the bigger picture was abundantly clear even then, he says. "There are way more animals in the research area than around [it]," Leendertz says, and when it comes to long-term research projects, "the benefit is, I think, always bigger than the possible harm."
-- Reference Campbell G, Kuehl H, Diarrassouba A, N'Goran PK, Boesch C (2011) Long-term research sites as refugia for threatened and over-harvested species. Biology Letters. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0155 Abstract The presence of researchers, ecotourists or rangers inside protected areas is generally assumed to provide a protective effect for wildlife populations, mainly by reducing poaching pressure. However, this assumption has rarely been empirically tested. Here, we evaluate and quantify the conservation benefits of the presence of a long-term research area in Taï National Park, Côte d'Ivoire. A wildlife survey following 225 km of line transects revealed considerably higher primate and duiker encounter rates within the research area when compared with adjacent areas. This positive effect was particularly pronounced for threatened and over-harvested species, such as the endangered red colobus monkey (Procolobus badius). This pattern was clearly mirrored by a reversed gradient in signs of poaching, which decreased towards and inside the research area, a trend that was also supported with park-wide data. This study demonstrates that even relatively simple evidence-based analytical approaches can bridge the gap between conservation theory and practice. In addition, it emphasizes the value of establishing long-term research sites as an integral part of protected area management.
Siv Aina Jensen Leendertz has studied wild chimpanzees living in the tropical rain forest in Ivory Coast at close quarters for a year, and her doctoral thesis describes the health monitoring of this endangered species. Her thesis focuses on the risk of retroviral infection in these chimpanzees due to their hunting of monkeys.
Infectious diseases represent a growing threat to wild chimpanzees and other endangered species of apes. There is therefore a great need to monitor the health of these animals and to map sources of infection in their habitat.
Siv Aina Jensen Leendertz' research has shown a high incidence of the retroviruses simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), simian T-cell leukemia virus (STLV- type1) and simian foamy virus (SFV) in red colubus monkeys, which are the main prey of chimpanzees. Furthermore, she shows that the chimpanzees become infected with SFV due to their habit of hunting these monkeys.
However, infection by SIV was not detected in the chimpanzees, even though they are highly exposed to this virus. This apparent resistance poses interesting questions about the host-parasite relationship between SIV in red colobus monkeys and wild chimpanzees in their natural habitat. Retroviral infections in primates are precursors of, for instance, the human immunodeficiency virus HIV and Leendertz' doctoral research can therefore contribute towards research into retroviral infections in humans.
The thesis also describes general principles for health monitoring. The health of wild chimpanzees often has to be monitored from a distance and samples for analysis consist for the most part of faeces and urine. Leendertz has therefore developed and refined methods that are particularly apt for this kind of fieldwork.
Her research has been carried out in collaboration with The Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, The Taï Chimpanzee Project at the Department of Primatology at The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and The Epidemiology and Biostatistics Centre at The Norwegian School of Veterinary Science.
Siv Aina J. Leendertz presented her doctoral thesis on 29th October 2010 at The Norwegian School of Veterinary Science (NVH). The thesis is entitled: "Investigation of wild chimpanzee health and risk of retroviral infection through hunting of red colobus monkeys."
Among African Apes Stories and Photos from the Field Edited by Martha M. Robbins, and Christophe Boesch
Description: These compelling stories and photographs take us to places like Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda, Ivindo National Park in Gabon, and the Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire for an intimate and revealing look at the lives of African wild apes—and at the lives of the humans who study them. In tales of adventure, research, and conservation, veteran field researchers and conservationists describe exciting discoveries made over the past few decades about chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. The book features vivid descriptions of interactions among these highly intelligent creatures as they hunt, socialize, and play. More difficult themes emerge as well, including the threats apes face from poaching, disease, and deforestation. In stories that are often moving and highly personal, this book takes measure of how special the great apes are and discusses positive conservation efforts, including ecotourism, that can help bring these magnificent animals back from the brink of extinction. Contents: 1. Discovering Apes - Martha M. Robbins 2. Life and Death in the Forest - Christophe Boesch 3. Encounters with Bili Chimpanzees in the Undisturbed Gangu Forest - Cleve Hicks 4. Is Blood Thicker Than Water? - Gottfried Hohmann and Barbara Fruth 5. Our Cousins in the Forest—or Bushmeat? - Christophe Boesch 6. Discovering Chimpanzee Traditions - Crickette Sanz and David Morgan 7. Keeping it in the Family: Tribal Warfare between Chimpanzee Communities - Josephine Head 8. Winona’s Search for the Right Silverback: Insights into Female Strategies at a Natural Rain Forest Clearing in Northern Congo - Thomas Breuer 9. The Long Road to Habituation: A Window into the Lives of Gorillas - Chloé Cipolletta 10. Among Silverbacks - Martha M. Robbins 11. The Diversity of the Apes: What Is the Future? - Christophe Boesch
"Some of the most devoted primatologists offer a wonderful collection of first-hand accounts and splendid photographs that make us feel like we're beside them watching our relatives in the forest."
-Frans de Waal, author of Our Inner Ape and Chimpanzee Politics
Club P.A.N. is a conservation education program I have been involved with that runs in 12 schools around Tai National Park, Cote d'Ivoire. Every year we have been expanding the number of schools, students and community members we reach, through workshops, lessons and interactive community days. We have secured a large part of the funding for 2010-2011 and have just wrapped up the 2009-2010 school year.
We also initiated a African Giant Snail microproject last year which has been a huge success so far! This project provides a cheap, sustainable protein source to the Sakré community, and thus discourages bushmeat hunting, as well as a source of income to the Club P.A.N. group in Sakré. African Giant Snails are already enjoyed and eaten in the region (although they are normally wild caught).
Please visit our Club P.A.N. blog for our latest updates and more information, and thank you for checking it out!
I remember reading this article in Newsweek way back when and have been searching for it since, and today while doing my background reading for the previous post, i finally found it. A good companion piece is Nicholas D Kristof's op-ed on why we need to get money into African women's hands. Also Pray the Devil Back to Hell trailer (about how Liberia's women rose up against tyranny) at the bottom. Enjoy! -MA From http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12014185/site/newsweek/ Newsweek, April 3, 2006 issue Healing Powers African women are starting to take charge—making new laws, changing old attitudes, inspiring others to follow their lead. Who will help them mend a broken continent? by JOSHUA HAMMER with Alexandra Polier in Kigali
The national legislature on Monrovia's Capitol Hill is a forlorn wreck of a place, its façade peppered with bullet holes from the country's civil wars, its interior crumbling after two decades of looting and neglect. Legislators wander through darkened hallways that haven't had lights for years; the ceilings are so torn up they look as if they've been hit by mortar rounds. But on a recent Monday, red, white and blue bunting festooned the Joint Chamber and a volunteer band played jauntily on the balcony. Liberian tribal chieftains, Western ambassadors and other dignitaries filed in, buzzing with expectation. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first elected female leader in Africa's history, was coming to call.
Sweeping in with her entourage at 5 o'clock sharp, Johnson-Sirleaf, who looked both regal and grandmotherly, cast barely a glance over the rogues' gallery that packed the dim hall. There in the front row sat Sen. Adolphus Dolo, formerly known as General Peanut Butter, who stands accused of committing gross abuses as a wartime commander in rural Nimba County. Just behind him, smirking beneath a flaming red cap, was Sen. Prince Johnson, the leader of a breakaway rebel faction that hacked the ears off President Samuel Doe, then killed him, in 1990.
Glowering beside Johnson-Sirleaf on the podium was the new Speaker of the House, Edwin Snowe, accused by opposition leaders and human-rights groups of looting millions of dollars from the Liberian Petroleum Refinery Corporation. (Snowe denies the charge.) Front and center sat Sen. Jewel Howard Taylor, ex-wife of and First Lady to former warlord and president Charles Taylor. Hanging over everything was the specter of Taylor himself, who fled the country in 2003 and has since been accused of stirring up violence from afar.
Yet if Johnson-Sirleaf felt intimidated by the predators who surrounded her, she didn't show it. Instead, she displayed a genteel defiance toward those who wish her harm, and gave hope to those who regard her as a political savior. (A stunning 470,000 voters, or 60 percent, chose her in the November 2005 election.) Standing upright at the podium, she vowed to root out theft from the public coffers and announced a plan to establish a "code of honor" for all civil employees. "Mr. Speaker," she proclaimed, staring directly at Snowe, "we will fight this cancer of corruption."
Nobody doubts her sincerity. But look at what she's up against. For decades, men driven by a lust for power and self-enrichment have ruled the country and stripped it bare. Between 1990 and 2003, ragtag militiamen murdered, raped and plundered with abandon, leaving 150,000 dead and displacing half of the country's 3 million people. Monrovia hasn't had electricity since 1991. Unemployment stands at 80 percent, most schools have been shut down and the infant-mortality rate, at 129 per 1,000 births, is among the worst in the world. Annual per capita income, about $100, is the lowest anywhere.
Can this 67-year-old grandmother, this Harvard-trained economist who has never held a gun and, according to all who know her, never embezzled a dime, really rebuild her ruined country? She has the support of powerful allies—including George W. Bush, whom she met in Washington last week, and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. But how will she be able to work with the thugs who dominate the legislature? "We believe in redemption," Johnson-Sirleaf told NEWSWEEK. The war criminals in the government, she said, "were elected by the people in a free and fair process, and we accept the decision of the people, who have forgiven them. Unless they revert to their own former practices, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt."
Johnson-Sirleaf's ascendance is the most dramatic development in a quiet revolution transforming Africa. Across the continent, women's empowerment initiatives, disgust with male-dominated politics-as-usual and the inspiring examples of a few female leaders are propelling women to positions of clout in record numbers. Women in at least a dozen African countries are breaking the male stranglehold on national legislatures, cabinets, courts and other government institutions. They're making laws, changing attitudes, inspiring other women to follow them.
The women's revolution has come about partly by necessity. In Rwanda, the genocide led by the Hutu Army and militias nearly wiped out the male Tutsi population. When the killing ended in July 1994, women outnumbered men by seven to three. The government recognized that it faced a crippling shortage of men, and set aside nearly a third of parliamentary seats for female representatives. Now women make up half of Parliament—the largest percentage anywhere in the world.
But Africa's transformation also reflects a growing recognition that the corruption, civil war and decay that have plagued the continent for generations have been largely the work of men. In the past few years, grass-roots women's groups have been sounding a distinctly feminist message, arguing that the qualities displayed by women at the family level—fiscal integrity, maternal nurturing—may be what Africa needs to lift itself off its knees. Give an African woman a loan, they argue, and she'll spend it on her children's school fees and food for the family. Give it to a man, and he'll just as likely fritter it away.
Women certainly have different problems and priorities than men. Across Africa, they're often deprived of education, job opportunities, even the choice of marital partners. Rape is seldom punished. Polygamy is widespread, which has led to spiraling HIV-infection rates. Most African women have no right to own property. Yet the new female politicians are confronting these and other issues that their male counterparts haven't been willing to touch.
Johnson-Sirleaf, who suffered a rape attempt while in jail 20 years ago, worked with a group of female lawyers last year to push Liberia's transitional government to prescribe far tougher sentences for rapists. New laws guaranteeing a woman a sizable share of her late husband's estate just went on the books in Rwanda and Liberia. And microfinancing schemes aimed at freeing women from dependence on men are flourishing. As more women enter legislatures and raise awareness, issues such as inheritance rights, genital mutilation and wife abuse are all coming to the fore. Just as significant, a few African women have proved that they can match or exceed the abilities of men in areas that used to be off bounds—such as law enforcement and security.
Travel now to Lagos, the fetid commercial capital of Nigeria, long regarded as one of the most corrupt, dangerous countries on earth. In the hulking Federal Secretariat building on Lagos Island, Dora Akunyili stands ankle deep in the charred remains of her former office, eying burned air conditioners and dangling wires that still smell of smoke. This is the first time that Akun-yili has been back since March 2004, when arsonists doused four floors of the building with gasoline and set them alight. It was part of an effort by gangs to intimidate her and the law-enforcement agency she runs: the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, or NAFDAC. "It's depressing being back here," says Akunyili, a 50-year-old mother of three who has become one of the first women to run a police agency in Africa. "But it tells you just how desperate these people are."
Born in southeastern Nigeria to an educated family, Akunyili was a midlevel civil servant with a degree in pharmacology when she inadvertently drew the attention of powerful men in government. While working for the Petroleum Trust Fund, supervising the distribution of oil dividends in villages in southeast Nigeria, she was diagnosed with a potentially fatal pancreatic disorder. Given an $18,000 grant from the PTF, she flew to London for emergency surgery. The diagnosis proved wrong, and Akunyili did the unthinkable: she returned the money. Nigeria had just thrown off years of military rule and established a democracy, and the new president, Olusegun Obasanjo, was looking for a few good men—and women—to clean up the country's tainted agencies. He summoned Akunyili to Abuja, and offered her a job leading the fight against counterfeit drugs.
When Akunyili took over NAFDAC in February 2001, the organization was understaffed and demoralized. Counterfeit drug cartels operated with impunity, protected by corrupt judges, Customs agents and police. In league with manufacturers in India and China, the cartels flooded pharmacies and markets with phony antimalarial pills, antibiotics, blood thinners and dozens of other drugs. According to one study at the time, 80 percent of the pharmaceuticals in Nigeria were fakes. "People were dying in hospitals because of this," says Akunyili, who lost her own sister to an injection of fake insulin. "It was a disgrace."
Weeks after taking over NAFDAC, Akunyili targeted the leader of the most powerful cartel, Marcel Nnakwe, a multimillionaire with an army of bodyguards and protectors high in the government. She pressured wholesalers to reveal Nnakwe's secret warehouses, and acquired product samples for testing. When results proved his drugs were fakes, Akunyili demanded—and got—a confession and a public letter of contrition.
The gesture was meaningless. Fetishes turned up in Akunyili's office as a warning: chicken feathers dipped in blood, a dried tortoise, cowrie shells, beads. Her aides and staff were terrified. Akunyili put a permanent guard at the door, but also stationed agents at ports and seized container loads of phony pharmaceuticals destined for Nnakwe. She raided more warehouses, and NAFDAC destroyed piles of seized drugs in huge bonfires in Lagos.
In December 2003, assassins came for Akunyili. They pulled alongside her Peugeot sedan as she was being driven to work, and opened fire with AK-47s. A bullet grazed her scalp; another killed a bus driver. After the attempt on her life, Akunyili sent her three children—ages 18, 25 and 27—out of the country. But she refused to flee. "If I left after the shooting, I'd look like a coward," she told NEWSWEEK. "I told my family, 'Let me strive to complete my five years'."
Last year Nnakwe and his son were charged in an Abuja court with organizing the attempted hit. But six months into their trial, the judge abruptly announced he had no jurisdiction and freed the defendants. They have gone into hiding. "I suspect it was not just a bribe but a threat [that caused the judge's ruling]," Akunyili says. Despite the setback, Akunyili's crackdown on the cartels has been a huge success. A 2004 study conducted by Britain's Department for International Development said that fake drugs in circulation in Nigeria had declined by 80 percent since she took over. Trust has largely been restored to the pharmaceutical industry. And though Nnakwe remains at large, his drug empire has been broken.
Some countries will be harder to repair than others. In the hallways of Rwanda's National Parliament on the verdant outskirts of Kigali, the chatter and laughter of dozens of women resound through the corridors. It's a dramatic counterpoint to the mortar rounds and machine-gun fire that echoed here a dozen years ago, when Rwandan Patriotic Front guerrillas fought a fierce battle for Parliament with the genocidal Hutu regime. During the war and genocide, hundreds of thousands of Tutsi women and girls were raped, and tens of thousands contracted AIDS. Now, partly in response to that crime, many female legislators have joined forces to rewrite the law—and change the way Rwandan men regard women.
The unprecedented campaign began early last year. Female lawmakers drove through 22 districts, gathering anecdotal evidence from women about their experiences. The progressive sexual-rights bill they drafted establishes a sentence of 15 years for rape, makes spousal abuse a crime, guarantees women an equal split of assets in the event of a divorce, allows them to gain custody of their children and requires that the government set up shelters for victims of wife beating. The bill has received backing from President Paul Kagame, and stands an excellent chance of becoming law this year. "The world is looking to us as role models for gender-based violence," says Rep. Judith Kanakuze, who cosponsored the bill.
Few other African nations have been as progressive. Women in Kenya still have no rights to own property, rape is seldom punished and gender violence appears to be on the rise. Even in countries where tough new laws exist on paper, enforcing them will be difficult. Some 90 percent of Liberian women are illiterate, which makes it hard for them to claim their rights under new property and rape laws passed in 2003 and 2005. But they couldn't ask for a better advocate than Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
The new president knows the painful contours of their lives. Although a person of privilege—who had ample opportunities to remain in the West and live a comfortable life—she repeatedly returned home in the face of danger. She says she was raised that way. Her indigenous parents—both adopted as children by Americo-Liberians, the descendants of freed slaves who founded Liberia in 1847—were role models. Her father was the first native Liberian to win election to the country's Congress, but his career was cut short by a crippling stroke when he was in his 40s. Martha Johnson, Ellen's mother, was the family breadwinner, an itinerant Methodist minister who cared for her invalid husband and four kids. Mom traveled from church to church by canoe, often taking the children along. "The things we did as kids instilled hard work and honesty," says the president. "We did chores before and after school, we said prayers every morning. We understood the sanctity of 'do not steal'."
Ellen could have been killed on any number of occasions. She was Finance minister in 1980 when soldiers led by Sgt. Samuel Doe murdered President William Tolbert and seized power. Days later the rebels rounded up 13 top officials, tied them to stakes on a Monrovia beach and shot them dead before a cheering crowd. Johnson-Sirleaf was one of a handful of regime insiders who weren't executed. Five years later, after rival officers attempted another coup, Johnson-Sirleaf again was high on Doe's enemies list. Locked inside a Monrovia prison with 15 men, she cowered in terror as soldiers led her cellmates into a courtyard and executed them. Later that night, one of the killers came back to rape her; she was rescued by a sympathetic guard. "Doe had the opportunity to kill me, but whether because of my international contacts, or my positions, he never gave the instructions to do it," Johnson-Sirleaf says. She spent six months in prison, then was acquitted. She fled to the United States shortly after that.
She knows what it means to grab for a thin reed of hope, only to have it break. In the late 1980s, when Charles Taylor was assembling a ragtag rebel force in Côte d'Ivoire, Johnson-Sirleaf gave him aid and encouragement. "So many people supported him in the early days," Johnson-Sirleaf recalls. "But he betrayed everybody. He was hungry for power." Taylor and his rivals fought a vicious civil war for seven years. When it subsided, Johnson-Sirleaf returned to Liberia and challenged Taylor in elections. But the country was volatile, and most feared that if Taylor lost, he'd return to the bush and restart the war. He won with 75 percent of the vote.
Now that she's finally in control, Johnson-Sirleaf needs all the support she can get. Yet expectations are so high, say analysts and diplomats, that Liberians face an inevitable letdown. Already, female activist groups have complained that she didn't appoint enough women to her cabinet, and foes in Congress reprimanded her for making a state visit to Gabon without their permission. She was forced to dial back on a campaign pledge to restore electricity across Liberia in 150 days; she says now that she'll turn some lights on in Monrovia within six months.
Other pressures are growing on Johnson-Sirleaf from outside the country. During an interview with NEWSWEEK at the end of January, she blasted the European Union for threatening to withhold aid until she leans on Nigeria to extradite Charles Taylor to face trial for war crimes. "I just think they're passing the buck on to me," she said, eyes flashing with annoyance. "They should have taken care of this issue before I came to office. It's hanging over my head."
Two weeks ago, she bowed to pressure and publicly called for Taylor's extradition to the war-crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone —risking a backlash by Taylor loyalists. Nigeria later agreed to turn him over to Liberian custody. "I believe that Ellen's personal survival is at risk," says Minister of Gender and Development Varba Gayflor. "I told the U.S. Embassy, 'Guard the life of Ellen Sirleaf, whatever else you do'."
Fifteen thousand U.N. peacekeepers have kept Liberia quiet since 2003. And the U.S. government has committed $1 billion through 2006 to support the peacekeepers, rebuild Liberia's infrastructure and provide demobilized soldiers with education and jobs. Johnson-Sirleaf can't afford to dwell on the dangers. "I've invested my time, my life, my safety in this country, and the Liberians have always defended me," she told NEWSWEEK. "Now I need to stand by them."
She downplays her role as an African pioneer. "I always start from the note that I'm a technocrat who happens to be a woman," she says. "We're not running a women's government." Still, she says she'll keep pushing for women's rights, making sure that rapists get prosecuted, perhaps even setting government hiring quotas. As a result of her success and the achievements of other women on the continent, Johnson-Sirleaf says, "Women know not only that they can compete, but also that they can excel. They can be mothers and also professionals. They know that we don't have to be stuck in the backyard." It's a shining model for Africa, and even the world. But it's far from complete. If Johnson-Sirleaf fails—if her friends and allies allow her to fail—this model will end up like so many others on the continent, a model of despair.
This is a topic very dear to my heart since the MPI-EVA Conservation Group (of which I am a member) in collaboration with the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation (WCF), Office Ivorien des Parcs and Reserves (OIPR) and the Ministère de l’éducation National - Inspection de l’enseignement Primaire de Soubré1 (CPE) started a similar project but with school children instead of hunters this year. Visit our Club P.A.N. blog for more information on our project! - MA
From Discovery News Snails Are Saving Endangered Gorillas by Jennifer Viegas
Humble snails are helping to prevent Cross River gorilla poaching in Nigeria, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.
The WCS has just launched a new program that promotes snail farming, which helps local people generate income, provides an alternative source of animal protein, and hopefully will eliminate illegal hunting of what is Africa’s rarest and most endangered great ape.
Eight former gorilla hunters were selected from four villages to participate in the new initiative. With help from the WCS, they've constructed snail pens, each of which was stocked with 230 African giant snails. Because of the snail’s high protein content, coupled with low maintenance costs, quick results, and easy replication, snail farming is expected to catch on quickly.
Just as French chefs prize snails, locals there view these gastropods as a delicacy and the high demand for them in villages and larger communities makes the prospect of farming viable.
“People living near Cross River gorillas have trouble finding alternative sources of income and food and that’s why they poach,” said James Deutsch, Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Africa program. “We are working with them to test many livelihood alternatives, but perhaps the most promising, not to mention novel, is snail farming.”
Once thought to be extinct, Cross River gorillas were rediscovered in the 1980s. The most endangered of the African apes, Cross River gorillas now number less than 300. Even if just a handful are taken as bushmeat, the killings can really put a dent in the gorilla's already weakened population.
Get this: The operation cost per year for each snail farmer, after necessary replacement of nets and cement and labor costs, is estimated at only $87. The profit, after expenses, with the sale of an average of 1500 snails per bi-annual harvest, is estimated at $413 per year. The meat of one gorilla, on the other hand, fetches about $70.
“Cross-River gorillas depend on law enforcement and conservation efforts to survive,” says Andrew Dunn, WCS Nigeria Country Director. “The work of WCS and our dedicated field-staff to develop alternate livelihoods for local poachers is just one step on the road to recovery for these incredible animals.”
from NYtimes.com
Deciphering the Chatter of Monkeys and Chimps By NICHOLAS WADE
Walking through the Tai forest of Ivory Coast, Klaus Zuberbühler could hear the calls of the Diana monkeys, but the babble held no meaning for him.
That was in 1990. Today, after nearly 20 years of studying animal communication, he can translate the forest’s sounds. This call means a Diana monkey has seen a leopard. That one means it has sighted another predator, the crowned eagle. “In our experience time and again, it’s a humbling experience to realize there is so much more information being passed in ways which hadn’t been noticed before,” said Dr. Zuberbühler, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Do apes and monkeys have a secret language that has not yet been decrypted? And if so, will it resolve the mystery of how the human faculty for language evolved? Biologists have approached the issue in two ways, by trying to teach human language to chimpanzees and other species, and by listening to animals in the wild.
The first approach has been propelled by people’s intense desire — perhaps reinforced by childhood exposure to the loquacious animals in cartoons — to communicate with other species. Scientists have invested enormous effort in teaching chimpanzees language, whether in the form of speech or signs. A New York Times reporter who understands sign language, Boyce Rensberger, was able in 1974 to conduct what may be the first newspaper interview with another species when he conversed with Lucy, a signing chimp. She invited him up her tree, a proposal he declined, said Mr. Rensberger, who is now at M.I.T.
But with a few exceptions, teaching animals human language has proved to be a dead end. They should speak, perhaps, but they do not. They can communicate very expressively — think how definitely dogs can make their desires known — but they do not link symbolic sounds together in sentences or have anything close to language.
Better insights have come from listening to the sounds made by animals in the wild. Vervet monkeys were found in 1980 to have specific alarm calls for their most serious predators. If the calls were recorded and played back to them, the monkeys would respond appropriately. They jumped into bushes on hearing the leopard call, scanned the ground at the snake call, and looked up when played the eagle call.
It is tempting to think of the vervet calls as words for “leopard,” “snake” or “eagle,” but that is not really so. The vervets do not combine the calls with other sounds to make new meanings. They do not modulate them, so far as is known, to convey that a leopard is 10, or 100, feet away. Their alarm calls seem less like words and more like a person saying “Ouch!” — a vocal representation of an inner mental state rather than an attempt to convey exact information.
But the calls do have specific meaning, which is a start. And the biologists who analyzed the vervet calls, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania, detected another significant element in primates’ communication when they moved on to study baboons. Baboons are very sensitive to who stands where in their society’s hierarchy. If played a recording of a superior baboon threatening an inferior, and the latter screaming in terror, baboons will pay no attention — this is business as usual in baboon affairs. But when researchers concoct a recording in which an inferior’s threat grunt precedes a superior’s scream, baboons will look in amazement toward the loudspeaker broadcasting this apparent revolution in their social order.
Baboons evidently recognize the order in which two sounds are heard, and attach different meanings to each sequence. They and other species thus seem much closer to people in their understanding of sound sequences than in their production of them. “The ability to think in sentences does not lead them to speak in sentences,” Drs. Seyfarth and Cheney wrote in their book “Baboon Metaphysics.”
Some species may be able to produce sounds in ways that are a step or two closer to human language. Dr. Zuberbühler reported last month that Campbell’s monkeys, which live in the forests of the Ivory Coast, can vary individual calls by adding suffixes, just as a speaker of English changes a verb’s present tense to past by adding an “-ed.”
The Campbell’s monkeys give a “krak” alarm call when they see a leopard. But adding an “-oo” changes it to a generic warning of predators. One context for the krak-oo sound is when they hear the leopard alarm calls of another species, the Diana monkey. The Campbell’s monkeys would evidently make good reporters since they distinguish between leopards they have observed directly (krak) and those they have heard others observe (krak-oo).
Even more remarkably, the Campbell’s monkeys can combine two calls to generate a third with a different meaning. The males have a “Boom boom” call, which means “I’m here, come to me.” When booms are followed by a series of krak-oos, the meaning is quite different, Dr. Zuberbühler says. The sequence means “Timber! Falling tree!”
Dr. Zuberbühler has observed a similar achievement among putty-nosed monkeys that combine their “pyow” call (warning of a leopard) with their “hack” call (warning of a crowned eagle) into a sequence that means “Let’s get out of here in a real hurry.”
Apes have larger brains than monkeys and might be expected to produce more calls. But if there is an elaborate code of chimpanzee communication, their human cousins have not yet cracked it. Chimps make a food call that seems to have a lot of variation, perhaps depending on the perceived quality of the food. How many different meanings can the call assume? “You would need the animals themselves to decide how many meaningful calls they can discriminate,” Dr. Zuberbühler said. Such a project, he estimates, could take a lifetime of research.
Monkeys and apes possess many of the faculties that underlie language. They hear and interpret sequences of sounds much like people do. They have good control over their vocal tract and could produce much the same range of sounds as humans. But they cannot bring it all together.
This is particularly surprising because language is so useful to a social species. Once the infrastructure of language is in place, as is almost the case with monkeys and apes, the faculty might be expected to develop very quickly by evolutionary standards. Yet monkeys have been around for 30 million years without saying a single sentence. Chimps, too, have nothing resembling language, though they shared a common ancestor with humans just five million years ago. What is it that has kept all other primates locked in the prison of their own thoughts?
Drs. Seyfarth and Cheney believe that one reason may be that they lack a “theory of mind”; the recognition that others have thoughts. Since a baboon does not know or worry about what another baboon knows, it has no urge to share its knowledge. Dr. Zuberbühler stresses an intention to communicate as the missing factor. Children from the youngest ages have a great desire to share information with others, even though they gain no immediate benefit in doing so. Not so with other primates.
“In principle, a chimp could produce all the sounds a human produces, but they don’t do so because there has been no evolutionary pressure in this direction,” Dr. Zuberbühler said. “There is nothing to talk about for a chimp because he has no interest in talking about it.” At some point in human evolution, on the other hand, people developed the desire to share thoughts, Dr. Zuberbühler notes. Luckily for them, all the underlying systems of perceiving and producing sounds were already in place as part of the primate heritage, and natural selection had only to find a way of connecting these systems with thought.
Yet it is this step that seems the most mysterious of all. Marc D. Hauser, an expert on animal communication at Harvard, sees the uninhibited interaction between different neural systems as critical to the development of language. “For whatever reason, maybe accident, our brains are promiscuous in a way that animal brains are not, and once this emerges it’s explosive,” he said.
In animal brains, by contrast, each neural system seems to be locked in place and cannot interact freely with others. “Chimps have tons to say but can’t say it,” Dr. Hauser said. Chimpanzees can read each other’s goals and intentions, and do lots of political strategizing, for which language would be very useful. But the neural systems that compute these complex social interactions have not been married to language.
Dr. Hauser is trying to find out whether animals can appreciate some of the critical aspects of language, even if they cannot produce it. He and Ansgar Endress reported last year that cotton-top tamarins can distinguish a word added in front of another word from the same word added at the end. This may seem like the syntactical ability to recognize a suffix or prefix, but Dr. Hauser thinks it is just the ability to recognize when one thing comes before another and has little to do with real syntax.
“I’m becoming pessimistic,” he said of the efforts to explore whether animals have a form of language. “I conclude that the methods we have are just impoverished and won’t get us to where we want to be as far as demonstrating anything like semantics or syntax.”
Yet, as is evident from Dr. Zuberbühler’s research, there are many seemingly meaningless sounds in the forest that convey information in ways perhaps akin to language.
Monkey calls give clues to language origins By Rebecca Morelle
from BBC News
(to hear clips of the monkey calls visit: BBCNews.com)
Scientists may be a step closer to understanding the origins of human language.
Two studies suggest that the ability to combine sounds and words to alter meaning may be rooted in a species of monkey.
A team found the Campbell's monkey can add a simple sound to its alarm calls to create new ones and then combine them to convey even more information.
The research is published in the journals Plos One and PNAS.
'Krak-oo'
Human language is incredibly complex, but one commonly used feature is the process of adding another unit - a prefix or suffix - to a word to change its meaning. For example, adding "hood" to the word "brother" to form "brotherhood".
A team looking at Campbell's monkeys ( Cercopithecus campbelli campbelli ) in the Ivory Coast's Tai National Park found that these primates do a similar thing.
The researchers studied alpha males in six wild groups. These monkeys do not play a very social role but are alert to potential threats and disturbances and use their calls to highlight them.
The researchers discovered that the monkeys made several distinct alarm cries, among them calls described as "boom", "krak" and "hok".
The team found that booms were sounded when a falling branch had been spotted or to initiate group travel.
Kraks were only given after a leopard had been sighted.
While hoks were almost exclusively sounded when a crowned eagle swooped above the canopy.
But further analysis revealed that while booms were always unaltered, the monkeys sometimes added an "oo" to their kraks and hoks - and this transformed the information they were conveying.
Klaus Zuberbuehler, an author of the paper from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, said: "If you add this subtle additional oo unit to turn krak into krak-oo, then that call can be given to a whole range of other contexts. If you take the suffix away then it is almost exclusively a leopard alarm call."
While krak-oo appeared to be a general alarm call given to almost any disturbance, hok-oo was used for commotion specifically in the canopy, from the presence of neighbouring groups of monkeys to a glimpse of other flying animals.
Professor Zuberbuehler added: "What is interesting is that the same acoustic modifier is being used for these calls and that is really analogous to using a suffix in human language."
'Boom, boom'
A second study focused on how Campbell monkeys combined their alarm calls, as they were more likely to use a longer sequence of calls than voice individual ones.
Professor Zuberbuehler said: "Sometimes the monkey can give 10, 15 or even 20 calls, and typically different types of calls can appear in these sequences... So we tried to understand what particular context would trigger these sequences."
The scientists found that a sequence made up only of booms was used to prompt the group to travel.
If a pair of booms was followed by some krak-oos, it was almost exclusively given when falling trees or branches had been seen.
But if two booms were followed by a mix of krak-oos and hok-oos, then that seemed to signal the presence of a neighbouring group of Campbell's monkeys or another lone male.
Professor Zuberbuehler said: "These are three different events that are nothing to do with each other, but they are basically made of the same call types."
He added: "This is the first time that we can demonstrate that these sequences convey something about the environment or an event the monkey has witnessed."
The researchers say that while the monkey's linguistic talents may be unique amongst primate species, if the findings prove to be more widespread then they could help to reveal more about the origins of language.
Professor Zuberbueler said: "Campbell's monkeys and humans separated from a common ancestor about 30 million years ago.
"This set of papers shows that in terms of the call morphology, there seem to be ancestral traits floating around the primate lineage that haven't been known before."
Have a break - have an ethical Kit Kat
from the Independant By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Nestlé are to convert the cocoa supply for its iconic bar to fairtrade producers
Nestlé, the world's biggest food company, is to pay poor cocoa farmers more for their beans by switching its best-selling Kit Kat chocolate bar to Fairtrade.
Emrbarking on what its UK chocolate boss described as an ethical "long journey", the four-finger Kit Kat will carry the Fairtrade logo from next month. Over the next two years the two-finger and other versions of the £183m-a-year bar will make the switch.
More than 8,000 cocoa farmers in Côte d'Ivoire (formerly Ivory Coast) will benefit from the decision, receiving an extra $150 a tonne, 4 per cent above the $3,384 world price.
They will also be able to sell their cocoa more directly to Nestlé and receive advice from the Swiss giant on raising yields and quality, which will further increase returns.
Nestlé said the extra money would fund education and healthcare in the West African state, which is recovering from the 2002-2007 civil war.
For the coffee-to-cereals multinational, the deal will help boost the supply of cocoa. Prices have spiralled to a 26-year high because of investor speculation and the failure of benighted producers such as those in Côte d'Ivoire to meet rising global demand.
Nestlé's decision will also help it improve its chequered reputation for ethics. In the 1970s and 1980s consumers boycotted the company, which makes Nescafe, Perrier and Cheerios, over its promotion of baby milk formula in Africa. The protests have fallen away in recent years with the adoption of a marketing code of conduct.
Kit Kat is the latest example of Fairtrade being "mainstreamed" following Starbucks' decision to convert its espresso beans, Tate & Lyle its retail sugar, and Cadbury its Dairy Milk, the UK's best-selling chocolate bar.
It came about after Nestlé Confectionery UK's managing director, David Rennie, visited Côte d'Ivoire in October. Asked to describe life for cocoa farmers there, he said: "They're not going hungry and they're not going thirsty but they live in a way in which the crops they produce are very important.
"The nearest school could be 20 or 30 miles away and they have no transport, so getting local village schools where kids can get literacy and numeracy skills without embarking on massive treks is really important.
"And the fact that we can go in and help them build schools and can give help on the ground was enlightening and heartening for me."
Only Kit Kats sold in the UK and Ireland will go Fairtrade, but Mr Rennie would not rule out other Nestlé chocolate brands following.
"In the UK we have started with as much of the Fairtrade cocoa from our co-operatives as we can get. And every single year we hope to get more of that and get it moving across all of Kit Kat," he said.
"We're putting no end point on this. As the cocoa supply develops, we want to continue our work on the Ivory Coast to support those farmers." Harriet Lamb, director of the UK-based Fairtrade Foundation, said the higher prices would "give a break" to the farmers of Côte d'Ivoire. "If any farmers need this kind of break, it's the farmers in Côte d'Ivoire," she added.
Nestlé sells one billion KitKat bars in the British Isles each year, which makes up 23 per cent of its UK confectionery sales. It and other leading chocolate bars will still contain palm oil, which is linked to human-rights abuses, deforestation and the loss of wildlife in South-east Asia. In October, Nestlé committed itself to buying only supplies certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil by 2015. "The commitment is the company moves by 2015 and I think for the whole company to get there by 2015, markets and product categories will get there quicker.
"So that's the end point, it's not the beginning point," said Mr Rennie, who described the Fairtrade commitment as part of a "long journey".
Last year, scientists were surprised to discover a large population of western lowland gorillas, a species close to extinction, in northern Congo Republic. Now there is news of another extraordinary find. In a multi-year survey of nesting sites along the coast of Gabon, scientists have found a startling number of leatherback turtles, possibly as many as 40,000, enough perhaps to remove leatherbacks from the list of globally endangered species. This is very good news, especially coupled with the fact that most of the nesting sites were discovered within protected areas.
In both cases, these new populations were located by conducting surveys in regions that had not been thoroughly combed before. Beyond relief, they remind us of what scientists felt in much earlier times, when explorers routinely chronicled the biological largess this world had to offer. Wonder was the predominant note in their chronicles, but there was also a keen eye for economic potential. Behind it all was the feeling of plenitude, that the biological riches of this planet were essentially inexhaustible, no matter what human beings did. That was clearly and tragically wrong.
Which brings us back to sea turtles and gorillas. We've grown accustomed to very different kinds of surveys, like the recent one showing that chimpanzee populations had dropped by 90 percent in Ivory Coast, which was supposed to be a stronghold for the species. In a very real sense, we are still exploring the planet, gradually obtaining a more realistic census of what life looks like in the early 21st century. Now and then there will be good surprises, like the fact that as many as 40,000 leatherbacks are nesting in Gabon. But the question those good surprises ultimately raise is a simple one: for how long?
If you're ever lost in the jungle, follow a chimpanzee. New research suggests the great apes keep a geometric mental map of their home range, moving from point to point in nearly straight lines.
"The kind of striking thing when you are with the chimpanzees in the forest is that we use a compass or GPS, but obviously these guys know where they are going," says Christophe Boesch, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
With the aid of GPS, he and colleague Emmanuelle Normand shadowed the movements of 15 chimpanzees in Côte d'Ivoire's Taï National Park for a total of 217 days.
In a given day, a single animal might visit 15 of the roughly 12,000 trees in its 17-square-kilometre range, Boesch says. "They are kind of nomads."
Chimp tracking
Each morning, researchers woke before a chimpanzee, and then tailed the animal until it went to sleep at day's end – often in a different nest. Researchers recorded their GPS position once a minute.
"We were able to do this study now because of the new GPS technology that works perfectly in the tropical forest. That was not the case five years ago," Boesch says.
After analysing all this data, he and Normand found good evidence that the animals chose their routes using a mental map built around geometric coordinates, as opposed to a navigation style based on landmarks for well-travelled routes.
While darting from fruit tree to fruit tree, individuals tended to move in straight lines, slowing only once they neared their destination. Chimps also visited trees from an angle that depended on current location.
This suggests the chimpanzees do not rely exclusively on landmarks such as specific trees and streams to navigate. These markers could come in handy once a chimp nears its destination.
Travelling in styles
Previous research and everyday experience suggests that humans, too, employ both styles of navigation, depending on their environment.
"In a city you can use roads, which are the classical landmarks, whereas if you are a Pygmy in the tropical rainforest or an Eskimo in the Arctic, where you have nothing as a landmark, then you will learn to get by using more sophisticated means," Boesch says.
Paul Garber, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, thinks that point-to-point distance might not be the only factor involved in a chimpanzee's choice of route.
Quantity and quality of food, as well as competition, could play a role in route choice. Also, like travelling salesmen who optimize their travels, chimpanzees may be thinking about navigation with an eye to the future, Garber says. "They may be planning not just one step in a route, but many, many steps ahead."
A new paper came out today on the insanely low numbers of West African Chimpanzees remaining in the wild. Click on this link to read the paper by Genevieve Campbell, Hjalmar Kuehl, Paul N'Goran Kouamé,and Christophe Boesch.
Summary:
Côte d'Ivoire is thought to be one of the final strongholds of the endangered West African chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus). In a recent assessment of their conservation status, Côte d'Ivoire was estimated to support between 8,000 and 12,000 individuals, accounting for almost half of the remaining world population [1]; however, this estimate was based primarily on a nationwide chimpanzee survey that was conducted in 1989–1990 [2]. Since then, information on chimpanzee abundance and distribution within this region has been sparse. To update the status of chimpanzees in Côte d'Ivoire and evaluate their population trend, we repeated the 1989–1990 survey. Our results show that there has been an alarming decline in chimpanzee numbers, and that urgent action is required to prevent them from disappearing entirely.
ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2008) — The opening of gorillas and chimpanzees reserves for tourism is often portrayed as the key to conserving these endangered great apes. There are also however serious concerns that tourism may expose wild apes to infection by virulent human diseases.
Commercial hunting and habitat loss are major drivers of the rapid decline of great apes, the researchers said. Ecotourism and research have been widely promoted as a means of providing alternative value for apes and their habitats. While close contact between humans and habituated apes has raised concerns about disease transmission, previous studies had only demonstrated the spread of relatively mild bacterial and parasitic infections from humans to wild apes.
A new study by researchers of the Robert Koch Institute (Berlin), the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) and the Centre Suisse des Recherches Scientifiques (Ivory Coast) confirms the disease threat, finding the first direct evidence of virus transmission from humans to wild apes. The study also showed however that research and tourism projects strongly suppressed the poaching of chimpanzees. This protective effect outweighed the substantial chimpanzee mortality caused by human disease introduction.
Respiratory disease introduction by humans has long been suspected at sites where apes in the wild have been in close contact to humans but this is the first study to diagnose the disease agent and quantify the population impact. "We need to be much more proactive about instituting strict hygiene precautions at all ape tourism and research sites", says Fabian Leendertz, senior author of the paper and a wildlife disease epidemiologist at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. "One possibility for promoting compliance is a certification process similar to the green labelling system now used in the timber industry."
The study used a multidisciplinary approach involving behavioural ecology, veterinary medicine, virology and population biology to track human disease introduction into two chimpanzee communities at Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire, where researchers first began to habituate chimpanzees to human presence in 1982. Tissue samples taken from chimpanzees that had died in a series of outbreaks dating back to 1999 tested positive for two human respiratory viruses that are major sources of human infant mortality in the developing world, namely human respiratory syncytial virus and human metapneumovirus.
Viral strains sampled from the chimpanzees were closely related to pandemic strains concurrently circulating in human populations as far away as China and Argentina, suggesting recent introduction from humans into the chimpanzees. The authors also used clinical observations and demographic analyses to infer that similar respiratory outbreaks could date as far back as 1986.
The research project has however also had strongly positive effects. Longitudinal surveys showed that the presence of researchers had suppressed poaching activities in the surrounding area. Consequently, chimpanzee densities at both the research study site and a nearby chimpanzee tourism site were much higher than would be expected given their accessibility to poachers. "Researcher presence is confirmed to have a major positive impact on the protection of an area," says co-author Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, who directs the research project at Taï. "However, it comes with some hygienic problems which need to be addressed."
"The study confirms that multidisciplinary research is needed to investigate different issues involved in ape conservation", said Paul N’Goran, a researcher at the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques en Côte d’Ivoire. "Our study shows the critical role that scientific research can play in monitoring the impact and effectiveness of conservation strategies."
Journal reference: Sophie Köndgen, Hjalmar Kühl, Paul K. N’Goran, Peter D. Walsh, Svenja Schenk, Nancy Ernst, Roman Biek, Pierre Formenty, Kerstin Mätz-Rensing, Brunhilde Schweiger, Sandra Junglen, Heinz Ellerbrok, Andreas Nitsche, Thomas Briese, W. Ian Lipkin, Georg Pauli, Christophe Boesch, and Fabian H. Leendertz. Pandemic Human Viruses Cause Decline of Endangered Great Apes. Current Biology, January 2008
Adapted from materials provided by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.
The Tai National Park is the largest undisturbed forest block in all of West Africa and home to a large number of western chimpanzees, hence our name P.A.N (the genus name for chimpanzees). P.A.N. also stands for Personnes, Animaux, Nature (People, Animals Nature) as educating people is a crucial part of nature conservation.
Club P.A.N. was conceived by the Conservation Group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology's Department of Primatology. The Conservation Group is made up entirely of graduate students from the department who want to participate in conservation activities in addition to their doctoral studies.
The Conservation Group approached the WCF with the club P.A.N. concept, in order to use their framework, solid infrastructure and strong ties with the Ivorian school system (Ministère de l’éducation National: Inspection de l’enseignement Primaire de Soubré1 (CPE)) to plan and organize the activities of the education program.
Please take the time to read through our site and support the WCF by buying some club P.A.N. merchandise!
The video below is from the first workshop of club P.A.N. in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The goal of the workshop was to introduce the teachers from the schools around the Tai National Park to the lessons and activities of club P.A.N. In the clip you will see the teachers acting as if they are students learning the lessons.
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