Twenty metres up, the canopy looks like a highway. Different shades of green, yellow and grey leaves fuse, creating the illusion of an endless rainforest. I spent most of 2013 in the canopy of a cloudforest in Colombia, collecting insects and arachnids from inside bromeliads and mosses. I was studying how their availability influences the […]
Tag: chimps
Chimps Eating Bat Poop Might Reveal Hidden Risks for Future Pandemics
A strange new behavior among chimpanzees in Uganda is raising red flags for scientists studying how diseases spill over from wildlife to humans. According to Earth.com, researchers observed chimps and other animals in Budongo Forest repeatedly eating bat guano as a replacement for lost mineral sources. For years, chimps relied on Raphia palm trees to […]
Chimps consume equivalent of a beer a day in alcohol from fermented fruit
Someone have a word with the chimps? Observations of the apes in the wild show them imbibing the alcoholic equivalent of a half pint of beer a day through the vast amount of fermented fruit in their diet. Researchers arrived at the first estimates of wild chimp daily alcohol intake after measuring ethanol levels in […]
Famous bonobo Kanzi, known for smarts & gaming, dies at age 44
Kanzi, the world’s most celebrated bonobo who learned to communicate and play Minecraft with humans, died last week in Iowa, U.S., at the age of 44. Ape Initiative, a research organization in the city of Des Moines dedicated to the study and conservation of endangered bonobos (Pan paniscus) and where Kanzi lived since 2004, said […]
July 14th is World Chimpanzee Day
We chimps are smart Perhaps as smart as you We are better at being chimps Than you humans Are at being you We love we quarrel We eat we play So many things we do During an average chimp day We are endangered What’s the fuss? We want you humans to Care about us
Sick chimps seek out medicinal plants to heal themselves, study finds
Wild chimpanzees actively seek out plants with medicinal properties to treat themselves for specific ailments,a new study has found. While most animals consume foods with medicinal properties as part of their routine diet, few species have been shown to engage in self-medication in a way that suggests they have basic awareness of the healing properties […]
Chimpanzees Improve Tool-Using Skills Into Adulthood, Study Finds
Scientists have discovered that the highly intelligent and social chimpanzee continues learning and honing the use of tools well into adulthood. This ability could be vital for the evolution of complicated and varied tool use. In the study, the researchers said tool use is rare in animals, but they discovered that chimpanzees employed hand grips […]
Chimps are dying of the common cold. Is great ape tourism to blame?
There was something wrong with the chimpanzees. For weeks, a community of 205 animals in Uganda’s Kibale national park had been coughing, sneezing and looking generally miserable. But no one could say for sure what ailed them, even as the animals began to die. Necropsies can help to identify a cause of death, but normally, […]