Very Important Scientist of the Month: Emma Normand

Chimps use geometry to navigate the jungle by Ewen Callaway
from New Scientist online

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."

Journal reference: Animal Behaviour (DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.01.025)

AMAZING! Willie Smits restores a rainforest

Please take 20 minutes and watch this phenomenal story.
(click here if video does not work)

Goualougo Chimpanzees craft the ultimate termite fishing rod

By Rebecca Morelle
Science reporter, BBC News



Scientists believe they have solved the mystery of why some chimpanzees are so good at catching termites.

A team working in the Republic of Congo discovered that the chimps are crafting brush-tipped "fishing rods" to scoop the insects out of their nests.

They filmed the wild primates using their teeth to fashion the tools.

Writing in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, the researchers said the probes' frayed ends helped the chimpanzees to collect more termites.

Lead researcher Crickette Sanz, from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said: "They have invented a way to improve their termite-fishing technique."

Surveillance techniques

Previous studies have suggested that wild chimpanzees use brush-tipped tools to fish for termites.

But until now it has been unclear whether this was a specially crafted design feature or whether the frayed edges were a by-product of repeated tool use.

Using remote cameras to film the chimps as they sought out their insect snacks, the team was able to find an answer.

Dr Sanz told the BBC: "We found that in the Goualougo Triangle in the Republic of Congo, the chimpanzees were modifying their termite-fishing tools with a special brush tip."

To make their rods, the chimps first picked some stems from the Marantaceae plant and plucked off the leaves.

"They then pulled the herb stems through their teeth, which were partially closed, to make the brush and they also attended to the brush by sometimes pulling apart the fibres to make them better at gathering the termites," Dr Sanz added.

Learned skill

Further research revealed that a stem with a frayed tip collected 10 times more termites than a pointed probe.

Dr Sanz said: "The chimps seem to understand the function of the tool and its importance in gathering termites."

So far, the team have only found this behaviour in chimps in the Goualougo Triangle.

The apparent absence of this in populations in eastern and western Africa suggests that it is not an innate skill found in all chimpanzees.

Instead it seems that the Goualougo primates are learning the crafting techniques from other chimps.

The researchers say they now want to find out if chimps in this region are creating any other kinds of tools.

Dr Sanz said: "Large areas of central Africa have been largely unstudied and so there are many populations that could have examples of complex tool use that we just do not know about."

However, she added that further research might be hampered as the species was under threat.

"Just as we are learning about these exciting new complex tool behaviours, the chimps that are showing us these behaviours are under danger from logging, poaching and Ebola," she explained.

"There is a lot we need to do to conserve the chimps in the Congo Basin."

Dr Sanz worked on the paper with Josep Call, also from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, and David Morgan from the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Visit the Goualougo Website here and the Goualougo Youtube page here!

Top 10 WORST science jobs of 2009

image from popsci.com

Popsci.com has come up with its annual list of top 10 WORST science jobs. #1 - Triage Biologist:
If global-warming predictions are right, as many as a quarter of mammals now alive could be extinct in our lifetime; in other groups of plants and animals, casualties could be as high as 40 percent. Considering that humankind doesn’t have the money or know-how to save them all, some scientists are calling for ecological triage—choosing which critters to preserve and which to abandon. It’s a concept that came to Stanford University biologist Terry Root, who has worked on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after witnessing her husband’s cancer treatment. “I realized I’m an oncologist for the world. I realized that for some species, it’s already too late,” she told a conference last year. “And then there are species who, like my husband, we can work to save. And part of what we have to do is this horribly, horribly difficult process of figuring out what we can save.” Researchers are already devising intelligent ways to make Terry’s choice. Marc Cadotte and a group at the University of California at Santa Barbara recently published a paper assessing which flowering plants in grasslands make it over the species-saving bar. Their general conclusion is that it behooves us to save the most genetically unique species and the ones that preserve functional ecosystems, which are often one and the same. Eventually, every species will have to be judged. Pity the poor scientists who have to spend their days crossing cute, fuzzy things off the list.

To see the rest of the 2009 list click here
and to see previous years' lists click here

Videos from the Goualougo Triangle, Republic of Congo!

"Wild living" alocholic Vervet Monkeys

A video from the BBC's "Weird Nature" series of "wild living", vervet monkeys from St. Kitts that perform daily raids on the island's bars. Parallels between human drinking habits (and actions) are discussed.

Genetic census reveals that the Bwindi gorilla population may not be growing

photo K. Guschanski

Adapted from a New Scientist report by Linda Geddes

Fewer mountain gorillas are living in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (BINP) than previous estimates suggest. This is one of only two places worldwide where the gorillas survive in the wild. Traditionally, conservationists estimate gorilla numbers by counting nests and examining the dung outside each one. “Each individual constructs a nest to sleep in, and before they leave in the morning, they defecate outside it,” says Katerina Guschanski at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Liepzig, Germany. According to this method, there are 336 gorillas left in the 331-square-kilometre national park. But when Guschanski’s team analysed DNA samples from each pile of dung using a new genetic counting method, the population estimate dropped by 10 per cent to 302. This suggests that some individuals had been counted twice using the old technique (Biological Conservation, doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2008.10.024). “We assumed that each individual constructs a single nest, but genetic analysis shows that several individuals construct more than one nest,” says Guschanski. This has been observed in studies of lowland gorillas, who construct more than one nest if the original nest starts leaking during a rainstorm, or if a youngster finds the one that it has just built uncomfortable, she adds. “It is a great confirmation of what new molecular techniques can do for wildlife censusing,” says Marcus Rowcliffe of the Institute of Zoology in London. It might also mean that the gorilla population in the park is not growing after all – a census in 1997 found 300 gorillas, while one in 2003 found 320 individuals, but these figures may also be inaccurate. “Now we don’t really know what is happening with this population,” says Guschanski. “Probably the safest thing is to assume that the population is stable, but we will need to wait for another four to five years to assess how it is changing.” Although it is bad news that the population is slightly smaller than expected, “it is much better to have an accurate estimation of the population”, says James Burton of the Earthwatch Institute in Oxford, UK. “Knowing whether it is increasing or decreasing governs the conservation activities.” The estimate of 380 for the mountain gorillas living in the other main reserve – Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo – may be more accurate, as the gorillas are more accustomed to human contact and can therefore be counted directly.

The article can be found here: Guschanski K, Vigilant L, McNeilage A, Gray M, Kagoda E, Robbins MM (2009) Counting elusive animals: comparing field and genetic census of the entire mountain gorilla population of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda. Biological Conservation. (doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2008.10.024)

Abstract
Accurate population size estimates are an essential part of every effective management plan for conserving endangered species. However, censusing rare and elusive wild animals is challenging and often relies on counting indirect signs, such as nests or feces. Despite widespread use, the accuracy of such estimates has rarely been evaluated. Here we compare an estimate of population size derived solely from field data with that obtained from a combination of field and genetic data for the critically endangered population of mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda. After genotyping DNA from 384 fecal samples at 16 microsatellite loci, the population size estimate was reduced by 10.1% to 302 individuals, compared with 336 gorillas estimated using the traditional nest-count based method alone. We found that both groups and lone silverbacks were double-counted in the field and that individuals constructed multiple nests with an overall rate of 7.8%, resulting in the overestimation of the population size in the absence of genetic data. Since the error associated with the traditional field method exceeded the estimated population growth of 5% in the last 4 years, future genetic censusing will be needed to determine how the population size is changing. This study illustrates that newly improved molecular methods allow fast, efficient and relatively affordable genotyping of several hundred samples, suggesting that genetic censusing can be widely applied to provide accurate and reliable population size estimates for a wide variety of species.