![]() Header Image – Drawing of an Eastern chimpanzee ( Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) of the Bili-Uéré region in Northern DR Congo.The Chimpanzee is a species of ape that is natively found in a variety of different habitats in western and central Africa. MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY We simply hope that the many threats they face won’t wipe out these chimpanzees just as we are learning more about their uniqueness.” Without this, it may be difficult to envisage the innovations made by our own ancestors in the woodlands of Africa millions of years ago”.Ĭhristophe Boesch, director of the Department of Primatology at the MPI-EVA and a co-author of the study, says: “It is great to have found these fascinating behavioral traits in this population. “We need such natural laboratories in order to understand the way in which material culture spreads among healthy, thriving populations of hominids. “In today’s overdeveloped world, opportunities such as this, to study a large intact nonhuman great ape culture interconnected across tens of thousands of kilometres of forest, are vanishingly rare”, says Hicks. What a nice surprise, then, to find a new chimpanzee behavioral realm! This just goes to show that not everything has yet been mapped out, and we have so much more to learn about the natural world”, says co-author Hjalmar Kühl, an ecologist at the MPI-EVA and the research center iDiv. ![]() “Nowadays we may feel like we have already discovered all there is to discover. Finally, ground-nesting behavior is common across the area”, adds Hicks.ĭespite an overall similarity of behaviors across two sides of a major river (the Uele) and in two very different habitat types (savannah-tropical forest mosaic to the north and tropical moist forest to the south), the research team encountered some geographic variation in the chimpanzees’ behaviour, including differing encounter rates for epigaeic driver ant tools, a lack of honey-digging tools to the south and long driver ant probes and fruit-pounding sites only to the north of the Uele River. “We have also documented tentative evidence of the pounding of African giant snails and tortoises against substrates, both novel food resources for chimpanzees. These chimpanzees, on the other hand, appear not to exploit the common termite Macrotermes muelleri, for which chimpanzees fish at a number of other long-term research sites. and Thoracotermes macrothorax, a resource that chimpanzees in most other regions ignore. In addition, the researchers document an expanded percussive technology associated with food processing: in addition to pounding hard-shelled fruits against substrates (which is seen in other chimpanzee populations), the Bili-Uéré apes also pound open two kinds of termite mounds, Cubitermes sp. From left to right: tool for the extraction of Epigaeic Dorylus ants, honey (ground), honey (tree), Ponerine ants, Dorylus kohli ants South Uele tools. kohli, and stout digging sticks used to access underground meliponine nests.” Chimpanzee tool types in Northern DR Congo. “We describe a new chimpanzee tool kit: long probes used to harvest epigaeic driver ants ( Dorylusspp.), short probes used to extract ponerine ants and the arboreal nests of stingless bees, thin wands to dip for D. Hicks, guest researcher at the MPI-EVA and associate professor at the Faculty of ‘Artes Liberales’, The University of Warsaw. “Over a 12-year period, we documented chimpanzee tools and artefacts at 20 survey areas and gathered data on dung, feeding remains, and sleeping nests”, says lead author Thurston C. This set of behaviors covers a minimum of 50,000 km² and possibly extends across an even larger area. A team of researchers from the MPI-EVA and the University of Warsaw now present a detailed description of a new ‘behavioral realm’ in Eastern chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) of the Bili-Uéré region, Northern DR Congo. Previously, several large-scale behavioral patterns in chimpanzees have been documented, including the use of clubs to pound open beehives in Central Africa and long tools to scoop up algae across multiple sites in West Africa.
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