Scoop on 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...

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!

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 r...

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

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 poi...