Cameroon islands offer safe home for orphaned chimps

MARIENBERG - Adolescent chimps are, in some respects, rather similar to their human counterparts.They live with mum until well into their teens, are sometimes a bit cheeky and, being highly social animals, struggle to survive alone until they have been taught how to fend for themselves.So when poachers kill mother chimps for food, keep the young chained in captivity for the exotic pet trade, or the family group is destroyed when its forest home is cleared for commercial palm oil plantations, the orphaned chimps need help.In Cameroon, the NGO Papaye International runs a sanctuary for the endangered animals on three islands in the Douala-Edea national park."The chimpanzees in the sanctuary are chimpanzees that have had a tragic past due to poaching, deforestation and groups that have been killed," said Marylin Pons Riffet, the 57-year-old French head of the charity.AFP | Daniel Beloumou Olomo"We only take in orphaned chimpanzees, who are young and therefore need the helping hand of man after having had a gun pointed at them or their habitat destroyed," she told AFP.The charity helps the orphans become re-accustomed to surviving in semi-wild conditions, but on islands away from their only predator -- the humans with whom they share 98 percent of their DNA and a good degree of behaviour.Populations of common chimpanzees, which used...

Read More........→December 31, 2024

Gorillas Use Chest Beating to Prevent Conflict, Not Provoke it, a New Study Finds

Male gorilla – credit Kabir Bakie at the Cincinnati Zoo CC 2.5.A gorilla’s chest beating is an incredible sight, and sound, to behold, but new research based on years of observation of mountain gorillas shows there’s much we never understood about this iconic acoustic.Since people first went to see King Kong, or since gamers first met Donkey Kong from the Mario Bros franchise, most might say male gorillas beats their chests with their fists, and as a sign of challenge or triumph.Apart from the fact that they use cupped hands, it seems to serve a number of functions—a challenge not necessarily being one of them.Edward Wright, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute, spent between 2014 and 2016 observing 500 chest beats from 25 different silverback mountain gorillas in Rwanda’s national parks.Using acousitc monitoring equipment he and his colleagues determined that the chest thumping was an honest demonstration of body size. This hints at several organizational aspects of gorilla social life. The first is that larger animals were recorded at lower frequencies which could travel half a mile.By beating their chests, air sacks underneath their larynx reverberate from the kinetic energy, producing a sound, and the bigger the male, the deeper the sound. This is believed to broadcast how big and dominant a male gorilla is as a means...

Read More........→December 18, 2024