There are about 40 members to a group. There are 100 chimps in Mahale Mountains National Park. In this group, there are 10 males, 40 females, and 50 juveniles. They move daily in large groups. When food is scarce, they move in small groups. The males stay in groups more but females stay alone with their kids more often. They wean their kids at 4-5 years old.
Sometimes a chimp will eat the leaf of some plant, but they don't chew it, just swallow it and it is thought that they do so for medicinal rather than nutritional purposes. They also lick salt from nearby rocks. Chimps will eat meat 2-3 times/week. They especially like to eat leaf-eating red colobus. They also eat bushbucks, bushpigs, and rodents. Among primates, they will eat blue monkey, red monkey, and galago. Galago is nocturnal so during the day if they find one they'll eat it. Once they have caught some meat, males will share with another male or a female if she's in heat. A female who gets meat will usually only share with her young.
Babies ride underbelly first year, then in jockey position until 4 or 5 years old. Females make a bed to nap in during the day and another to sleep in during night, but males only do it at night. Babies learn how to do it from their moms. Making your own bed is a final stage in a juvenile's education. If a new female shows up and was in between two group' ranges for a while, the males from the group that adopts her might kill her baby since they're not sure that it wasn't someone from the other group who sired it. This was a really sad part in the movie 'cause they were kind of graphic about it.
Babies begin playing hard at about 3 years, but they play lightly from 3 months. They continue playing 'til about 7 yrs old. Baby chimps, like human babies, chew on anything that catches their eye. They stick their fingers in holes etc. At age 6 months to 1.5 years, when baby switches from underbelly to jockey position, the babies often dangle from shoulders and things while they're learning. Chimps nurse about 2 min/hr until they're about 5 years old.

I didn't like this movie nearly as much as the other ones. The narrator had a really strange speech pattern which kept distracting me from what he was trying to say.

(First we finished up on gorillas, but I've put those notes on the day they are really attached to, Sept. 27)

Last Friday marked the end of the taxonomic study of primates, and now we're going to do several topical lectures.

Conservation

The Current Status of Primate Conservation

"All discussion about Africa must begin and end with a recognition, however grim, of the continent's underdevelopment and poverty."

--John Bonner, 1993

Low reproductive potential: Take for example the chimp; they only produce a baby every 5-6 years, and there's a very high infant mortality- 50% die in their first two years. This means that populations can't bounce back very quickly. Also, they live in low population densities, so to save a large population you need a lot of ground!

Threats to Primate Populations

Habitat destruction: This is much less selective in that it affects several species in a single area. It is also irreversible; you can't captive breed rainforests. If you deplete an animal's population (without making them extinct), they can recover but if their habitat is gone they can't ever recover. Habitat destruction is more difficult to combat than overharvesting, because humans don't NEED pets but they do need more space so they intrude on the monkeys' habitats.
Habitat destruction is divided into two types; small-scale and large-scale. Small-scale woodcutting is for example, hand logging; someone finds a nice mahogany tree and goes in and cuts it up. It would also include cutting wood for firewood. Most of the world's population still uses wood for heat and cooking, and as the population grows, there is more need for wood. Also as populations grow, they clear more and more for agriculture. You may have heard of slash and burn agriculture- People will clear out a whole forest, burn it off, plant a crop, get 1-2 years and then the soil will get depleted so they move on and cut some more. Before, this practice was ok because there was so little going on that the forest could grow back up but now it's getting cleared too fast for the forest to catch up.
Large-scale destruction is like commercial logging- clearing out complete forests. A lot of the forests go to make paper. Much of the SE Asian rainforests are used to supply paper for Japan. Also, cattle ranching is big in S America to produce beef for export for places like Macdonalds. Oil refineries in Asia also take up space once covered in rainforests. This kind of behavior is irreversible because rainforests can't just grow back like a field. The soil is really thin and doesn't have much nutrients. Rainforests have a complex ecosystem in which the nutrients are very efficiently recycled. However, when the trees are all cut down, the rain washes the soil with all the nutrients away and it all ends up in rivers where it just becomes pollutants. So, when a large area is cut and then left it just becomes poison to the surrounding area.
So now we know that some destruction is from multinational corporations and some is from local people needing firewood or food. You might think that the damage from commercial use is worse, that it's all the big companies who have no heart who are the bad guys. In actuality, in Africa for example, 1/3 of the forest clearing is from corporations but 2/3 is from the local people, mostly for agriculture. It's really the exponentially expanding human race that is making life so difficult for the rainforests.

Regional Surveys

Madagascar: Contains 13 genera and 28 species, with all species endangered. In fact, 14 lemurs are already extinct. (They disappeared within the last 1000 years or so, basically since humans first populated the place.) One was huge, like gorilla-sized, it just hung around in trees like a koala. But now it's gone. Madagascar is improportionally important for its acreage because its species don't occur anywhere else in the world.

Africa: Contains15 genera and 55 species, with 14 of these species endangered. The most critical is the gorilla. You might think of them as living in very remote areas far away from people, but it's just a small mountain range which hasn't been cleared because it's too steep. The fields and clearings come right up to base of mountains where the gorillas live.

Asia: S and SE Asia, more specifically. Contains 9 to 16 genera and 50 to 56 species, with 16 species considered endangered. The most critical is rhinopithecus- the golden monkey. Also endangered are the orangutan and all 9 species of the gibbon- in other words, all the Asian apes.

Potential Solutions

...to Habitat destruction: This problem is a lot more difficult to solve. A crucial part of the solution is education, especially of young people but also of adults. In a lot of cases it doesn't make any economic sense to destroy- these habitats are more valuable in the long term to conserve than to destroy but in short term they give an immediate relief. Pretty much the only hope at this point is reserve systems- we need big chunks of land set aside. But the countries who have the land to preserve are all pretty poor. What you also may not realize is that developing countries set aside more of their land than first world countries. You can't just sit on your high horse and condemn all those darn countries for being greedy and killing the world's rainforests. Indonesia, for example, has between 12 and 25% of its lands protected.

Some other countries:

Kenya	Tanzania	Zambia	Zimbabwe	Australia	Canada	New Zealand
6%	12%	8%	7%	5%	5%	9%

For example, let us look at Ranamafano National Park in Madagascar. It is 170 square miles and it was established in 1991. In the process, 72,000 people were displaced from in and around the area!!! Think about this happening in the United States! Do you think we'd ever be able to set aside all of Washington and Oregon as a national reserve, and just tell the people there too bad, they'd have to get out now?!
There is a problem with reserves, however; they're not always safe for the animals. When civil war broke out in Rwanda, it wasn't clear whether or not the gorillas would be safe. In many cases parks exist on paper but there's no money for hiring people to protect the areas, so when you go look, people are there clearing land and growing food on it.
More encouraging success stories combine the needs of primates and people, for instance tourism has worked well with gorillas. Up until the war, mountain gorilla tourism was the 2nd largest source of hard currency for Rwanda. Despite close contact between humans and gorillas, and thousands of visitors, there have been no injuries at this site.

The benefits of conservation are international but the costs are borne by the countries where the primates are found. 29 out of the 36 world's poorest countries are in Africa S of Sahara. Nine out of ten Africans live in poverty. The developed countries have to contribute somehow. For example, sometimes the US writes off the debt of a S American country in exchange for them setting up a nature preserve.

Conclusion- Crisis and Opportunity

Some Links Relevant to Primate Conservation

Pan Africa News- The Newsletter of The Japan Committee for the Conservation and Care of Chimpanzees and The Mahale Wildlife Conservation Society
http://jinrui.zool. kyoto-u.ac.jp/PAN/home.html

A page on primate conservation in Vietnam published by the Institute for Ecology and Biological Resources, National Centre for Natural Sciences and Technology, National University of Hanoi
http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~vern/iebr.html

Environmental and Conservation Research
http://pipkin.lut.a c.uk/~ben/enres/envres.html

American Society of Primatologists Conservation Page
http://www.asp.org/asp/conser vation/

Even though we separate them for convenience, all of these topical lectures are connected. Feeding behavior is very connected and very basic to social behavior. The two readings that were assigned for this lecture are examples of how feeding ecology affects social behavior.

Nature of Food Supply Available to Primates

Differences in Food Dispersion and Availability

As you get closer to the equator, you get less seasonality, but in some places where primates live, there is a lot of seasonality. Leaves and stems, obviously, are very abundant. Fruits, on the other hand, are more clumped and less available overall. They are often locally abundant, however. Plant material is generally more abundant than animal material. The distribution and availability of food makes a difference in behavior.

Types of Food Used and Prototypical Users

Feeding Behavior and Anatomy

Body size:

To put it another way,

Given their higher energy needs per unit weight, smaller animals must eat easily-digested foods that can be processed quickly. Foods don't have to be abundant since small animals require small amounts of food in absolute terms.

In contrast, large animals with smaller energy requirements per unit wight can process food more slowly, but their total requirements are great. Thus food must be abundant but not necessarily easy to digest.

Insects are rare, but are of high quality. Leaves are abundant but of low quality, and fruit is in between on both axes.

Teeth & Guts:

Behavioral Consequences of Food Choice

Temporal factors

Spatial factors

Behavioral Adaptations of Folivores

Medicinal Plant Use

Some drug companies research new drugs by looking at native people's medicinal use of plants. They are now finding that they can learn these kinds of things by watching the monkeys in the area as well.

An example of a plant chimps have been seen to use in this way:Vernonia amygdalina
Used by local people in these cases:

Parasites; schistosomiasis (blood flukes) malaria anthelminthic (intestinal worms) amebic dysentery intestinal disease constipation diarrhea

Other uses; scurvy coughing rheumatism pms