Ivory Coast: Race to save the chimps

To support the efforts of the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation in Cote d'Ivoire please go the their homepage!

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.”

A little shamless "self" promotion: Club P.A.N.

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!

Club P.A.N. blog cross-posting - snails saving apes

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 the Club PAN blog: FREE conservation education downloads

All 10 lessons from the Club P.A.N. conservation education program are available for FREE download now! Just visit the Club P.A.N. blog or homepage for more information and all the links!

Friends of the Abidjan Zoo

You may have read about Gregoire, Africa's oldest known chimpanzee today. Gregoire, who was 66 years old, lived in solitary confinement in a barren cage at the Brazzaville Zoo for more than 40 years in the Republic of Congo's capital city. In 1997 he was airlifted to Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Sanctuary where he lived until his passing on Dec 17th, 2008 . For more on Gregoire click here.

Because of this story I would like to direct you to a great organization "Friends of the Abidjan Zoo/Amis du Zoo d'Abidjan" whose mission is: to transform Abidjan Zoo from a place where the animals are starving, depressed and living in prison-like conditions, into an enriched and stimulating environment where the animals are well-fed and content.

Please visit Friends of the Abidjan Zoo today and if you feel moved, donate to a really great cause this holiday season!

Alarming decline of West African chimpanzees in Côte d'Ivoire

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.

Club P.A.N. update

Here are three videos from three of the Club P.A.N.s that are operating around the Tai National Park in Ivory Coast. Julia Riedel recorded these clips when she was in Ivory Coast in February of this year to observe how the project has been running so far.

Visit the club P.A.N. site here

Club P.A.N. Sakré:


Club P.A.N. Petit Tiemé:


Club P.A.N. Ziriglo:


Club P.A.N. is part of the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation's (WCF) conservation education program currently operating around the Tai National Park in Ivory Coast.

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.

see original post about club P.A.N. here

Welcome to Club P.A.N.

Visit the club P.A.N. site here

Club P.A.N. is part of the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation's (WCF) conservation education program currently operating around the Tai National Park in Ivory Coast.

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.

Visit the club P.A.N. site here