Scoop on Primates

Just a few weeks ago, monkey carcasses were found in the luggage of a man who went through Customs at Dulles airport.  Bushmeat is illegal in the US, so the meat was confiscated and the man was let go.  According to The Bushmeat Project website , "People pay a premium to eat more great apes each year than are now kept in all the zoos and laboratories of the world.  If the slaughter continues at its current pace, the remaining wild apes in Africa will be gone within the next fifteen to fifty years.  With them will vanish most of the equatorial rain forest, and the cultures of indigenous people who have lived there for millennia." Some would argue that bushmeat is a necessary evil to feed starving human populations, yet the reality is that bushmeat is a health hazzard to those who consume it. Many diseases can be transmitted cross-species.  Non-human primates (apes and monkeys) are susceptible to many of the same diseases humans are. Hunting, butchering and eating bushmeat pla...

Humans rely primarily on face recognition to identify their family members and friends; so do chimpanzees according to a report published on December 18 in "Current Biology", a Cell Press publication. This paper offers new insight into the origin of face recognition in humans, scientists say. Lisa Parr and Frans De Waal, both researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta - GA, have demonstrated  that chimpanzees, using a joystick device, are able to accurately match unfamiliar female chimpanzees photos with the photos of their sons. This ability to recognize faces is one of the major factors that helped chimpanzees create complex societies in which alliances and networking are crucial. Using Positron Emission Tomography (PET), scientists have now discovered that humans and chimps both use similar brain regions to register faces and identify them. You can find out more about the subject by reading articles at the links below. Science Daily - Humans And ...

I wanted to share this video of Panbanisha, a bonobo at the Great Ape Trust, who paints. I also wanted to show her here because I have not included a lot of news about bonobos, so I wanted to make up for it. The Forgotten Ape, as Frans de Waal calls the bonobo, could be considered the "hippie" of the ape community.  Just like chimps, bonobos are "cousins"of ours.  Unlike chimps though, they prefer to solve their issues with physical promiscuity and love - this is one of the reasons we rarely see them in documentaries on television.   Quite reminiscent of the Janet Jackson wardrobe incident, isn't it?  Violence and foul language are OK on TV, but a boob sneak peek is not... but  I digress. Watch Panbanisha paint.  Quite amazing! If you are curious about bonobos, check the Friends of Bonobos organization, o r visit the Bonobo Conservation Initiative .

Monifa, a female gorilla at the San Francisco zoo, recently gave birth to a baby boy.  Here are links to pictures and a video of the cute baby.

Dr Serge Wich of the Great Ape Trust of Iowa and author of Oryx - The International Journal of Conservation will present his latest findings on orangutan genetics at a scientific symposium on December 18 at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. In a paper published this month in "Primates", Dr Wich and his colleagues document findings that may shed some light on the evolution of speech.  All thanks to a 30 year-old orangutan female named Bonnie, resident at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. Bonnie took up whistling after hearing one of her caretakers make the sound. She was not trained, she just started whistling on her own, thereby proving that non-human primates can learn new sounds and use them voluntarily. Here is a link to a video of Bonnie and the article from the Great Ape Trust of Iowa .

With mounting scientific evidence that great apes (gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans) have emotional lives, families, complex societies and acquire knowledge they pass down from generation to generation, it is becoming harder for us humans to deny them basic rights. This is why the Great Ape Project (GAP) came to life.  The goal of this project is to remove apes from the legal realm of mere "property" and grant them the right to life and protection from torture. Although the articles I am including in today's post are somewhat dated, they are still relevant today. The first is a link to a page on the GAP website.  In June this year, the Spanish Congress announced its support of the Great Ape Project (GAP) - a milestone which hopefully will encourage other governments to take measures for the protection of great apes worldwide. The second is about a legal case in Austria , where an animal rights group (VGT) asked earlier this year for a chimpanzee named Matthew t...

Twins are not a common occurrence in the gorilla population, yet a female resident of Uganda's Bwindi National Park gave birth to a perfectly healthy set of twins sometime at the end of October. The twins were seen by the authorities of the park on November 2 for the first time. Read the full article from Afrique en ligne in English right here!

Gorillas are at the brink of extinction, especially mountain gorillas.  How can anyone forget the attrocious murder of a family of silver back gorillas in DRC last year. The United Nations is stepping up to the plate by declaring 2009 the Year of the Gorilla. This new initiative comes with a plan aimed at offering alternative livelihoods to bush meat hunting, new energy solutions that will protect the environment and the promotion of ecotourism. Two articles below - one from the United Nations website, the other from the International Herald Tribune.  Enjoy! Africa-wide UN action plan seeks to save the gorilla. UN officials launch "Year of the Gorilla"