My Friend the Baboon and Why I Love Primates

Today,  I feel like talking about the primates I know and why I am so interested in them.

My first encounter with primates was at the zoo as a child.  My father would say: "Let's go see your cousins, the chimps!"  Some kids may have been offended at the implied comparison between themselves and hairy, not so attractive primates.  I, on the other hand, was delighted.

Then I grew up, went on my merry way to jobs around the globe that had nothing to do with primates. Until one day at the Los Angeles zoo... I was sketching near the gorilla enclosure, as I had done every week-end for the last month, when something unusual happened.  A female gorilla sat at the edge of the enclosure, looked at me straight in the eyes and smacked her lips a few times. She then extended her left hand in my direction, as if to offer one of the leaves she was eating and smacked her lips again.  She repeated her behavior the week-end after, so without thinking I smacked my lips back at her.  We went at it for a good 3 minutes before she had enough and moved further away. 

That experience gave me a glimpse into a world I would later come to discover more intimately.  

I read about Jane Goodall and others who dedicated their lives to understanding apes and monkeys, but nothing changed dramatically the way I perceived primates until I read "Next Of Kin - My Conversations with Chimpanzees" by Roger Fouts.  

Fouts writes: "When I looked into Washoe's eyes she caught my gaze and regarded me thoughtfully, just like my own son did.  There was a person inside that ape "costume".  And in those moments of steady eye contact I knew that Washoe was a child, no matter what she looked like and no matter what acrobatics she performed in the top of a tree."

This is exactly the feeling I had when the gorilla "spoke" to me at the zoo.  There was someone in there.  I felt an urgent need to get involved.  I wanted to save the apes, raise awareness about their plight, the fact that most are on the brink of extinction.  So, when I found out there was an exotic animal shelter in my hometown where I could volunteer and do something positive for apes and monkeys, I enrolled. 

I have been volunteering for over two years now and have made many non-human primate friends.  They all have a different personality. They have their preferences for food, for their peers and for humans.  Their emotional lives are rich and complicated.

One of my best friends is a female olive baboon named Lucy.  She lip-smacks at me very hard as soon as I arrive and seems happy to see me.  We look at each other, I give her treats and we lip-smack some more.  I clean her cage and we lip-smack again.  Our relationship is simple but important to me.

I suspect it is important to her too because on a couple of occasions, she did not hesitate to show me how disappointed she was in me.  The two or three times I had to go away for a couple of weeks, she punished me when I returned by depriving me of her friendly lip-smacking.  She briefly acknowledged my presence by throwing a cold glance at me and resolutely moved away from me.  The first time it happened, I was taken aback.  I did not know what was going on.  I talked to her, offered her treats, which she refused before staring into emptiness away from me.  She clearly looked peeved.  Finally, towards the end of my shift, she came, took a treat and gave me a pitiful lip-smack, as if to say: "Alright, I forgive you this time, but don't do it again."

I now know what to expect, but I must say it does feel pretty weird to be scolded by a monkey.

Zakayo Blows 44 Candles!

Chimps can live a long time - till their forties in captivity.

Last Saturday, Zakayo, the poster boy of the Uganda Wildlife Education Center (UWEC) in Entebbe, celebrated his 44th birthday among his human and non-human primate friends.

Zakyao has been a resident at the UWEC since 1976 and has made it his mission to take care of 8 other chimpanzees who became residents since their rescue.  

Zakyao's reaching maturity is proof of the hard work the UWEC has been doing to preserve the declining population of chimpanzees.

Zakayo likes to climb trees and likes to spend time with two females, Amida and Ruth, whom he is particularly fond of.

Happy Birthday Zakayo and may many chimps live and prosper as you do!

Tree-climbing or Knuckle walking? That is the Question.

Up until this week, the assumption was that homo sapiens evolved from a knuckle-walking primate ancestor.  It seemed logical enough.  Two of our wrist bones fused, thereby making it easier for our ancestors' gate to be more stable while knuckle-walking.  But this week, the shattering news reached those of us interested in primates.  

Knuckle-walking?  Not so!  According to a new study published by Tracy Kivell and Daniel Schmidt, Independent evolution of knuckle-walking in African apes shows that humans did not evolve from a knuckle-walking ancestors.  Homo sapiens, they say, descend from a tree-climbing ancestor who then came down and evolved to bipedalism.

As a matter of fact, the authors argue the data they collected would indicate knuckle-walking evolved twice - thereby placing chimpanzees and bonobos in a different knuckle-walking category than gorillas.  They found that the wrist bone structure of gorillas is very different from that of chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest relatives.

Gorillas spend more time on the ground and in trees.  This, Kivell and Schmidt argue, would tend to indicate that our far away ancestor was a tree-climbing ape rather than a knuckle-walking one.

Knuckle walking evolved at two different times - medicalnewstoday.com.

Abducted Twin Baby Gibbons Still Missing

The night of July 15, twin baby gibbons were ruthlessly stolen from Parc Zoologique de Frejusin France.    

Gibbons are an endangered species and like with other primates, the birth of twins is extremely rare.  The scoundrels who abducted the baby gibbons, who were still feeding on their mother's milk, put the life of these toddlers at risk.  They also left their mom in an acute state of distress.  

Their only motivation is greed and they must be stopped.  

Should anyone hear about baby gibbons for sale, they should report them immediately to their local authorities, Interpol and contact the Frejus zoo director Mr. Guy J. Masquefa at zoofrejus@orange.fr. 

The babies have been separated from their mother for over three weeks.  The more time passes, the slimmer the hope of finding them alive.

To report wild life crimes, you can contact Interpol Wildlife Crime Working Group.

Chimps and Music

We (humans) are not alone in our appreciation of music.  A recent study conducted in Japan shows a baby chimp, named Sakura, pulling on a cord to repeat music she wants to play again.

The tunes used in the experiment last about 30-40 seconds, some are pleasant and some dissonant.  Sakura, the baby chimp, demonstrated over and over her preference for pleasant music tunes over dissonant ones.

Similar studies have demonstrated that human babies have a keen ability to appreciate music from a very young age, a few days old; yet testing music appreciation on non-human baby primates had never been done before.  Sakura had never been exposed to music prior to hearing the tunes in the lab.

If a "music gene" exists, such as was speculated in 2000, humans and chimps may be sharing it.

If so, what would Mother Nature have endowed us with such a gene?  What is its function?

Some speculate that it may have helped our ancestors to survive in the wild.  This is only speculation at this point, yet worth investigating further.

References:

Music on the Brain - Harvard press

BBC - Earth News - Chimps Born to Appreciate Music