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

Chimps are upping their tool game, says study

WASHINGTON - "Planet of the Apes" may have been onto something.Chimpanzees are steadily honing their tool-using skills -- a process unfolding over millennia, driven by the exchange of ideas through migrations between populations, according to a new study published Thursday in Science.The finding in chimps -- humans' closest living relatives -- holds relevance for us too, as it supports the idea that, deep in the mists of time, our own ape ancestors leveraged social connections to improve their technologies, lead author Cassandra Gunasekaram told AFP.Scientists have long marvelled at chimps' ability to pass down intricate behaviours, like tool use, from one generation to the next.Yet while human civilisation has leapt from the Stone Age to the Space Age, chimpanzee "culture" -- defined as socially learned behaviours -- seemed to have remained static.Gunasekaram, a doctoral student at the University of Zurich, set out to challenge this assumption.She and colleagues combined genetic data tracing ancient chimpanzee migrations across Africa with observations of 15 distinct foraging behaviours across dozens of populations and the four subspecies.These behaviours were categorised into three levels: those requiring no tools, those with simple tools, like using chewed leaves as a sponge to absorb water from tree holes, and the most complex,...

Read More........→December 10, 2024

Honk! These monkeys have truly legendary noses – now we better understand why they evolved

Slavianin/Shutterstock Katharine Balolia, Australian National University Of all the monkey species around the world, one stands out with its large, bizarre nose. In male proboscis monkeys, their bulbous noses will often hang past their mouths. But why evolve such a strange feature? Are they a visual sign of health and status to potential female mates, and to other males? Or did they evolve to help the monkeys make honks and other loud sounds? In our new study, published in Scientific Reports, we have deepened our understanding of these enlarged nasal structures by investigating what lies beneath: the structures in the skull. Our findings help to explain how these noses function as visual and acoustic signals of health and status. They also add to a growing body of evidence that shows researchers can use close examinations of skulls to glean information about primate social behaviour. A battle of noses One of the largest monkey species in Asia, proboscis monkeys (Nasalis larvatus) are endemic to the island of Borneo. They live in coastal mangroves, peat swamps and riverine forests, and have an unusual diet made up mostly of leaves. They can swim quite well and have webbed fingers and toes. They typically live in harem groups, made up of a single adult male (who tends to have a large, bulbous nose), some adult females...

Read More........→May 31, 2024

Ape Treating His Wound Using Medicinal Plant is a World First for a Wild Animal

Facial wound on adult male orangutan – Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior via SWNSEven though there is evidence of certain self-medication behaviors in animals, so far it has never been known that animals treat their wounds with healing plants. Now, biologists in Indonesia have observed this in a male Sumatran orangutan.After sustaining a facial wound, he ate and repeatedly applied sap from a climbing plant with anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving properties commonly used in traditional medicine. He also covered the entire wound with the green plant mesh.The closest relatives to humans, the great apes, are known to ingest specific plants to treat parasite infection and to rub plant material on their skin to treat sore muscles.A chimpanzee group in Gabon was recently observed applying insects to wounds, although the efficiency of the behavior is still unknown. Wound treatment with a biologically active substance, however, has never been documented before.Cognitive and evolutionary biologists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany—Caroline Schuppli and Isabelle Laumer—conducted the study at the Suaq Balimbing research site in Indonesia, which is a protected rainforest area home to around 150 critically endangered Sumatran orangutans.“During daily observations of the orangutans, we noticed that...

Read More........→May 08, 2024

Chimps shop like humans: Study

Photo Source: Thinkstock Washington: Chimpanzees use manipulative dexterity to evaluate and select figs, similar to the way humans shop for fruits and vegetables, researchers say. Figs are a vital resource for chimps when preferred foods are scarce. The study demonstrates the foraging advantages of opposable fingers and careful manual prehension, or the act of grasping an object with precision. The findings shed new light on the ecological origins of hands with fine motor control, a trait that enabled our early human ancestors to manufacture and use stone tools. "The supreme dexterity of the human hand is unsurpassed among mammals, a fact that is often linked to early tool use," said Nathaniel J Dominy from Dartmouth College in the US. For the study, researchers observed the foraging behaviours of chimpanzees, black-and-white colobus monkeys, red colobus monkeys and red-tailed monkeys in Uganda. The primates depended on figs, and although ripe figs come in a range of colours, many stay green throughout development and every phase can be present on a single tree, making it difficult to discern solely by colour, which figs are ripe. To determine if the green figs of Ficus sansibarica are edible, chimpanzees ascend trees and make a series of sensory assessments — they may look at the fig's colour, smell the fig, manually...

Read More........→May 31, 2016

Monkeys did sing like humans once

Photo source: Thinkstock Ancient monkeys used auditory cues similar to humans to distinguish between low and high sound notes, say researchers, adding that pitch perception may have evolved more than 40 million years ago to enable vocal communication and song-like vocalisations. Pitch perception is essential to our ability to communicate and make music. "But until now, we didn't think any animal species, including monkeys, perceived it the way we do. Now we know that marmosets, and likely other primate ancestors, do," said Xiaoqin Wang, professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University's school of medicine. Marmosets are small monkeys native to South America that are highly vocal and social. Other animal species have been reported to show pitch perception but none have shown the three specialised features of human pitch perception. First, people are better at distinguishing pitch differences at low frequencies than high. Second, humans are able to pick up on subtle changes in the spread between pitches at low frequencies or hertz. And third, at high frequencies, peoples' ability to perceive pitch differences among tones played simultaneously is related to how sensitive they are to the rhythm. Through a series of hearing tests, Wang's team determined that marmosets share all three features with humans, suggesting...

Read More........→January 17, 2016

Cute golden monkeys play in the snow in nature reserve

1   2   3   4   5   Next   Two baby golden monkeys play in the tree at the Dalongtan Golden Monkey Research Center in Shennongjia, in central China's Hubei Province, on Jan. 12, 2016. The Shennongjia Nature Reserve is home to the rare golden monkeys, which have lived for many years on the verge of extinction since they were first spotted in Shennongjia in the 1960s. The amount of golden monkeys in the nature reserve has doubled since the 1980s because of better environmental protection. [Photo/Xinhua]. Source: China.org.c...

Read More........→January 14, 2016

4 Million Year Old Menu: What Our Ancestors Ate

The diet of Australopithecus anamensis, a hominid that lived in the east of the African continent more than 4 million years ago, was very specialized and, according to a scientific study whose principal author is Ferran Estebaranz, from the Department of Animal Biology at the University of Barcelona, it included foods typical of open environments (seeds, sedges, grasses, etc.), as well as fruits and tubers.  Artist's concept for Australopithecus anamensi, Credit: Universidad de Barcelona Australopithecus anamensis (or Praeanthropus anamensis) is a stem-human species that lived approximately four million years ago. Nearly one hundred fossil specimens are known from Kenya and Ethiopia, representing over 20 individuals. Australopithecus anamensis bone fragment, Credit: University of Zurich The work, published in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences, is directed by lecturer Alejandro Pérez Pérez, from the Anthropology Unit of the Department of Animal Biology at the UB, and its co-authors are professor Daniel Turbón and experts Jordi Galbany and Laura M. Martínez. Australipithecus anamensis is a fossil hominid species described in 1995 by a team led by the researcher Meave Leakey and it is considered to be the direct ancestor of Australopithecus afarensis, known as Lucy, which lived in the same region...

Read More........→November 24, 2015

Planet of the Apes soon a reality?

Washington, August 16: A new study reveals that apes might be closer to speaking than many scientists thought. In a study, Marcus Perlman, who started research work at The Gorilla Foundation, sifted 71 hours of video of Koko, a gorilla best known for American Sign Language, interacting with other researchers, and found repeated examples of Koko performing nine different, voluntary behaviors that required control over her vocalisation and breathing. These were learned behaviors, not part of the typical gorilla repertoire. Perlman watched Koko blow a raspberry when she wanted a treat, blow her nose into a tissue, play wind instruments, huff moisture onto a pair of glasses before wiping them with a cloth and mimic phone conversations by chattering wordlessly into a telephone cradled between her ear and the crook of an elbow. Perlman said that Koko did not produce a pretty, periodic sound when she performed these behaviors, like people do when they speak, adding that she could control her larynx enough to produce a controlled grunting sound. He said that Koko was probably no more gifted than other gorillas: the key was her environment. This suggests that some of the evolutionary groundwork for the human ability to speak was in place at least by the time of our last common ancestor with gorillas, estimated to be around 10 million...

Read More........→August 17, 2015

Watch: Koko's Tribute to Robin Williams

Koko the gorilla is a resident at the Gorilla Foundation in Woodside, CA and communicates understands spoken English and uses over 1,000 signs to share her feelings and thoughts on daily life. Robin Williams met Koko in 2001. According to Koko's caretaker, it was a very cheerful encounter for both, and Koko has treasured it to this day. "When Koko learned of Robin's passing (on Aug. 11, 2014) she became very sad. We hope this video will lift her spirits and remind everyone of the profound gift of joy that Robin Williams brought to our world." Source: Articl...

Read More........→August 14, 2014

Chimpanzees have almost the same personality traits as humans

. Chimpanzees have almost the same personality traits as humans, and they are structured almost identically, according to new work. The research also shows some of those traits have a neurobiological basis, and that those traits vary according to the biological sex of the individual chimpanzee. Source: Bigfoot Evidence...

Read More........→May 01, 2014

Chimpanzees Are Rational, Not Conformists

Higher rewards himpanzees are sensitive to social influences but they maintain their own strategy to solve a problem rather than conform to what the majority of group members are doing. However, chimpanzees do change their strategy when they can obtain greater rewards, MPI researchers found. The study was published in PLOS ONE on November 28, 2013. Chimpanzees are known for their curious nature. They show a rich palette of learning behaviour, both individually and socially. But they are also rather  hesitant  to abandon their personal preferences, even when that familiar behaviour becomes extremely ineffective. Under which circumstances would chimpanzees flexibly adjust their behaviour? Edwin van Leeuwen and colleagues from the MPI's for Psycholinguistics and Evolutionary Anthropology conducted a series of experiments in Germany and Zambia to answer this question. Wooden balls for peanuts The researchers studied 16 captive chimpanzees at the Wolfgang Kohler Primate Research Center in Germany (Leipzig) and 12 semi-wild chimpanzees at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust, a sanctuary that houses more than a hundred chimpanzees under nearly natural conditions in the north-western part of Zambia. Chimpanzees were trained on two different vending machines. A minority of the group was made familiar with one machine...

Read More........→December 23, 2013

Young Apes Manage Emotions Like Humans

Credit: University of Wisconsin - Madison Researchers studying young bonobos in an African sanctuary have discovered striking similarities between the emotional development of the bonobos and that of children, suggesting these great apes regulate their emotions in a human-like way. This is important to human evolutionary history because it shows the socio-emotional framework commonly applied to children works equally well for apes. Using this framework, researchers can test predictions of great ape behavior and, as in the case of this study, confirm humans and apes share many aspects of emotional functioning. Zanna Clay, PhD, and Frans de Waal, PhD, of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, conducted the study at a bonobo sanctuary near Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Credit: University of Wisconsin - Madison Congo. The results are published in the current issue of theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Detailed video analysis of daily social life at the sanctuary allowed Clay and de Waal to measure how bonobos handle their own emotions as well as how they react to the emotions of others. They found the two were related in that bonobos that recovered quickly and easily from their own emotional upheavals, such as after losing...

Read More........→October 17, 2013

Search for ape man continues against the odds

An imagined recreation of the disputed ape-like creature, Bigfoot, stands in a museum in Shennongjia, Hubei province. [File photo/For China Daily] That ever elusive figure known as Bigfoot, or Yeren (wild man) to the Chinese, is bouncing back to life as a group of Chinese scientists and explorers scout around for international help to mount a new search for it - even though the debate over its existence has lingered for decades. Bigfoot, also known elsewhere as the  abominable snowman, in this case refers to a half-man, half-ape creature in the Shennongjia Nature Reserve, in a remote, mountainous part of Hubei province, in Central China. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, authorities organized three high-profile expeditions to search for signs of Bigfoot, but came up empty handed. In view of the large amount of expenditure required for these expeditions, the government decided to put a stop to them. Nonetheless, curiosity about the mysterious man-like creature still lingered among experts and ordinary folk alike. Then, last November, the Wild Man Research Association was founded in Hubei, pulling in more than 100 members interested in the search for Yeren, including a number of scientists and experts. These included the 75-year-old Wang Shancai, of the Hubei Relics and Archaeology Institute, who is...

Read More........→June 12, 2013

Scientists Announce Top 10 New Species

Credit: Composite: Jacob Sahertian An amazing glow-in-the-dark cockroach, a harp-shaped carnivorous sponge and the smallest vertebrate on Earth are just three of the newly discovered top 10 species selected by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. A global committee of taxonomists — scientists responsible for species exploration and classification — announced its list of top 10 species from 2012 today, May 23. The announcement, now in its sixth year, coincides with the anniversary of the birth of Carolus Linnaeus — the 18th century Swedish botanist responsible for the modern system of scientific names and classifications. The top 10 new species list was announced May 23 by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. The 2013 list includes an amazing glow-in-the-dark cockroach, a harp-shaped carnivorous sponge, and the smallest vertebrate on Earth -- a tiny frog. It also includes a snail-eating false coral snake, flowering bushes, a green lacewing, a hangingfly fossil, a monkey with a blue-colored behind and human-like eyes, a tiny violet and a black staining fungus. Also slithering it way onto this year's top 10 is a snail-eating false coral snake, as well as flowering bushes from a disappearing forest in Madagascar, a green lacewing that was discovered...

Read More........→May 26, 2013

Chimps show greater genetic diversity than humans

London,Groups of chimpanzees within central Africa are more different genetically than humans living on different continents, a study has found. The Oxford University-led study published in the journal PLoS Genetics suggests that greenomics can provide a valuable new tool for use in chimpanzee conservation. It has the potential to identify the population of origin of an individual chimpanzee or the provenance of a sample of bush meat, a release from Oxford University said. Common chimpanzees in equatorial Africa have long been recognised as falling into three distinct populations or sub-species: western, central and eastern chimpanzees. A fourth group, the Cameroonian chimpanzee, has been proposed to live in southern Nigeria and western Cameroon but there has been considerable controversy as to whether it constitutes a distinct group. Oxford University researchers, along with scientists from the University of Cambridge, the Broad Institute, the Centre Pasteur du Cameroun and the Biomedical Primate Research Centre, examined DNA from 54 chimpanzees. They compared the DNA at 818 positions across the genome that varied between individuals. Their analysis showed that Cameroonian chimpanzees are distinct from the other, well-established groups. And previous conclusions that Cameroonian and western chimpanzees are most closely related...

Read More........→March 14, 2013

American geneticist claims Bigfoot is real after sequencing his genomes in a DNA study

Last November team of American scientists led Dr Melba Ketchum of DNA diagnostics in Nacogdoches, Texas, announced that they have found proof that the legendary ‘Sasquatch’ or ‘Bigfoot’ actually exists. After sequencing three Bigfoot genomes the team concluded that Sasquatch is extant in North America and is a human relative that arose approximately 13 thousand years ago as a hybrid cross of modern Homo Sapiens with some unknown primate species. The Voice of Russia contacted Dr Ketchum to ask her for the details of one of the most controversial projects of the decade. Voice of Russia: Before we get into details, I would like to ask you how you came up with the idea to study bigfoot. At the very least, this is a very unusual choice of study for a serious geneticist. Dr Melba Ketchum: Well, I must say that it came to me, I did not choose it. What we do in our laboratory is we perform species identification mostly for forensic use. However, over the years we have also been receiving samples that supposedly contained DNA of a Bigfoot or a Sasquatch. Five years ago one of the TV show production companies asked us to identify some samples one of which was allegedly a yeti sample. At the same time I also received the samples from North America Bigfoot Search Organization. We did not have enough DNA to go far with neither of the samples...

Read More........→March 03, 2013