Coronavirus: Calls to protect great apes from threat of infection

By Helen Briggs BBC News

25 March 2020 

Conservation experts are calling for urgent action to protect our closest living relatives, the great apes, from the threat of coronavirus.

New measures are needed to reduce the risk of wild gorillas, chimps and orangutans encountering the virus, scientists warn in a letter in Nature.

Habitat loss and poaching are big threats to the survival of great apes, but viruses are also a concern.

Scientists say the current outbreak warrants the utmost caution.

Infectious disease is now listed among the top three threats to some great ape groups.

"We do not know what the effect of the virus on them is and that means we have to take the precautionary principle and reduce the risk that they will get the virus," said Prof Serge Wich of Liverpool John Moores University, UK, who is a co-signatory of the letter.

"That means halting tourism, which is happening in several countries already, reducing research, being very cautious with reintroduction programmes, but also potentially halting infrastructure and extractive projects in great ape habitats which bring people in closer contact with great apes and thus potentially spread this virus to them."

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Great apes found to bond when watching videos together

JULY 18, 2019 REPORT

by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A pair of researchers affiliated with Duke University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has found that great apes tend to bond with one another when they watch a video together. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Wouter Wolf and Michael Tomasello describe their work involving studying chimpanzees and bonobos as they watched videos together and how they behaved afterward.

Most people have experienced the feeling of bonding with another person, or even several people, when watching a movie or TV show together. Until now, behavioral scientists have believed such feelings were restricted to humans. In this new effort, Wolf and Tomasello have shown that great apes have similar experiences.

The experiments involved seating pairs of chimps together in front of a television so that they could watch a video, and the researchers took measurements of bonding-type behaviour after the video was over. They then compared the behaviour they observed with a control group. They report that chimps that watched the videos together engaged in more bonding-type behaviours.

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New data shows 'staggering' extent of great ape trade

By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent, Johannesburg 

A new database suggests say there has been a dramatic under-reporting of the live, illegal trade in great apes. 

Around 1,800 orangutans, chimpanzees and gorillas were seized in 23 different countries since 2005, the figures show.

Since 90% of the cases were within national borders they didn't appear in major data records, which only contain international seizures.

The new database has been published at the Cites meeting here in Johannesburg.

Records incomplete

Comprehensive data on the illicit trade in great apes is rare. 

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) only keeps records of international seizures, which experts in the field have long believed was giving a misleading impression.

The new Apes Seizures Database paints a more detailed picture, compiling figures for any seizure of a great ape in an unlawful situation dating back to 2005.

"It's definitely a staggering number, it's larger than we expected," said Doug Cress from the Great Ape Survival Partnership, who have put together the new database.

"We're finding that it's really averaging about two seizures a week around the world. That may seem small but the usual ratio for a chimpanzee is that to get one alive you've had to kill five or 10, for gorillas it's like four to one.

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Four out of six great apes are now critically endangered as 'global extinction crisis' escalates

'To see the eastern gorilla – one of our closest cousins – slide towards extinction is truly distressing'

Ian Johnston Environment Correspondent 

The largest primate on Earth – the eastern gorilla – is now “critically endangered”, it has been officially announced after a staggering decline in their population in just 20 years. The decision by the International Union for Conservation of Nature(IUCN) means that four out of the six great apes – both types of gorilla and both types of orangutan – are feared to be on the brink of extinction.

It would perhaps not be surprising if they were to die out. Of more than 82,000 species assessed by the IUCN, nearly 30 per cent are facing that fate – almost entirely because of the actions of humans.

Geologists are currently considering reclassifying the Earth’s present geological epoch as the Anthropocene – a name that reflects the extent of our impact on the planet – partly because of what some scientists are already calling the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth. If they are correct, it is a slaughter comparable to the disappearance of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, when a massive asteroid is thought to have hit what is now Mexico, sending a blanket of thick smoke around the Earth.

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Great apes communicate cooperatively

May 24, 2016

Human language is a fundamentally cooperative enterprise, embodying fast-paced interactions. It has been suggested that it evolved as part of a larger adaptation of humans' unique forms of cooperation. In a cross-species comparison of bonobos and chimpanzees, scientists from the Humboldt Research Group of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen now showed that communicative exchanges of our closest living relatives, the great apes resemble cooperative turn-taking sequences in human conversation.

Human communication is one of the most sophisticated signalling systems, being highly cooperative and including fast interactions. The first step into this collective endeavour can already be observed in early infancy, well before the use of first words, when children start to engage in turn-taking interactional practices embodying gestures to communicate with other individuals. One of the predominant theories of language evolution thus suggested that the first fundamental steps towards human communication were gestures alone.

The research team of Marlen Fröhlich and Simone Pika of the Humboldt Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology together with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the Ludwig- Maximilians-University in Munich and the Kyoto University in Japan, conducted the first systematic comparison of communicative interactions in mother-infant dyads of two different bonobo and two different chimpanzee communities in their natural environments.

The bonobos were studied over the duration of two years in the Salonga National Park and Luo Scientific Reserve in the Democratic Rebublic of Congo. The chimpanzees were observed in the Taï National Park, Côte D'Ivoire, and Kibale National Park in Uganda.

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Last hope for great apes is vaccination against the rapid onslaught of disease

Scientists warn that wild ape populations, already devastated by poachers and habitat loss, now face a new threat from Ebola and other viruses

Robin McKie

Sunday 10 April 201600.05 BST

Vaccine campaigns to protect wild chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans could be the only hope of preventing the planet’s remaining great apes from suffering catastrophic population crashes, scientists have warned.

They say that recent surveys of several populations of great apes have revealed devastating drops in numbers and that protective steps must now be taken as a matter of urgency.

One report, published last week, revealed that numbers of Grauer’s gorilla, the largest of all the great apes, had plunged from 17,000 to fewer than 4,000 over the past 20 years. Other reports have said that devastating forest fires in Indonesia, in addition to the spread of palm oil plantations, have wiped out thousands of square miles of rainforest, the home of the orang-utan. Again, species numbers have plummeted.

“Several factors are involved in the terrible losses that are occurring in our fellow great apes,” said Peter Walsh, a primate ecologist at Cambridge. “However, diseases – some spread by humans – are the ones that we can do most about in the short term.”

Three main human-induced impacts are blamed for the devastation of great ape numbers in recent years:

■ Habitat loss. Swaths of jungle in Asia have been turned to palm oil plantations and have brought the orang-utan to the edge of extinction in many areas. Now oil companies are eyeing up central Africa for similar treatment;

■ Bushmeat. Eating chimpanzee and gorilla meat has become a widespread source of protein in several countries in central Africa and has depleted numbers further;

■ Disease. Epidemics such as Ebola fever have affected humans, but also chimps and gorillas. The latter suffered a death toll of tens of thousands during the last outbreak.

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Declining great apes of Central Africa get new action plan for conservation for the next decade

Date:

April 7, 2015

Source:

Wildlife Conservation Society

Summary:

The number of gorillas and chimpanzees in Central Africa continues to decline due to hunting, habitat loss, and disease, combined with a widespread lack of law enforcement and corruption in the judicial process, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Wildlife Conservation Society, WWF, and partners in a new conservation plan.

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Monitoring Ebola in wild great apes -- using poop

Date:

September 18, 2014

Source:

Wildlife Conservation Society

Summary:

A group of international scientists has developed a new method to study Ebola virus in wildlife. The new methodology exploits the fact that, like humans, apes surviving viral infections develop antibodies against them. Typically, those antibodies are measured in the blood. The scientists, however, developed a laboratory technique that can isolate antibodies from ape feces.

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Great apes face extinction: conservationist Jane Goodall

Jul 29, 2014

The world's great apes face extinction within decades, renowned chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall warned Tuesday, in a call to arms to ensure man's closest relatives are not wiped out.

"If we don't take action the great apes will disappear, because of both habitat destruction as well as trafficking," Goodall told AFP in an interview in the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

In the past half century, chimpanzee numbers have slumped from two million to just 300,000, spread over 21 countries, said Goodall, a British scientist who spent more than five decades studying chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe National Park.

"If we don't change something, they certainly will disappear, or be left in tiny pockets where they will struggle from inbreeding," said the 80-year-old, the first scientist to observe that apes as well as humans use tools.

Experts predict that at the current rate, human development will have impacted 90 percent of the apes' habitat in Africa and 99 percent in Asia by 2030, according to a UN-backed report last month.

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Borneo's Orangutans Are Coming Down from the Trees

July 29, 2013 — Orangutans might be the king of the swingers, but primatologists in Borneo have found that the great apes spend a surprising amount of time walking on the ground. The research, published in the American Journal of Primatology found that it is common for orangutans to come down from the trees to forage or to travel, a discovery which may have implications for conservation efforts.

An expedition led by Brent Loken from Simon Fraser University and Dr. Stephanie Spehar from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, travelled to the East Kalimantan region of Borneo. The region's Wehea Forest is a known biodiversity hotspot for primates, including the Bornean orangutan subspecies, Pongo pygmaeus morio, the least studied of orangutan subspecies.

"Orangutans are elusive and one reason why recorded evidence of orangutans on the ground is so rare is that the presence of observers inhibits this behaviour," said Loken. "However, with camera traps we are offered a behind the scenes glimpse at orangutan behaviour."

The team positioned ground-based cameras across a 38-square-kilometre region of the forest and succeeded in capturing the first evidence of orangutans regularly coming down from the trees. The amount of time orangutans spent on the forest floor was found to be comparable to the ground-dwelling pig-tailed macaque, Macaca nemestrina, which is equally abundant in Wehea Forest. Over 8-months orangutans were photographed 110 times, while the macaques were photographed 113 times.

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Outgoing Gorillas Live Longer Than Shy Ones

Extroverted gorillas in captivity outlive their shy brethren, a new study of these great apes in North American zoos and sanctuaries finds.

Using methods adapted from studying human personality, keepers, volunteers, researchers and other caretakers gauged 298 individual gorillas' temperaments. These gorillas were followed over 18 years and their life spans recorded. The results revealed the the more sociable, active, playful and curious the gorilla, the longer it was likely to live.

The results are consistent with studies finding that human extroverts outlive introverts, too, study researcher Alex Weiss of the University of Edinburgh said in a statement.

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/25254-outgoing-gorillas-outlive-shy.html

Great ape habitat in Africa has dramatically declined

Great apes, such as gorillas, chimps and bonobos, are running out of places to live, say scientists.

They have recorded a dramatic decline in the amount of habitat suitable for great apes, according to the first such survey across the African continent.

Eastern gorillas, the largest living primate, have lost more than half their habitat since the early 1990s.

Cross River gorillas, chimps and bonobos have also suffered significant losses, according to the study.

Details are published in the journal Diversity and Distributions.

"Several studies either on a site or country level indicated already that African ape populations are under enormous pressure and in decline," said Hjalmar Kuehl, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who helped organise the research.

Continued:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19731343

Apes' Simple Nests Are Feats of Engineering

When they are ready to snuggle up at the tops of trees, great apes make themselves cozy "nests" in which to rest for the night. New studies of these one-night nests reveal their incredible complexity.

"They are almost as complex as a man-made shelter you might make," study researcher A. Roland Ennos of the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience. "They know how the wood is going to break, and they have a feel for how strong they have to make it [the nest]. That shows the apes have intelligence and have a feel for the physics of their environment."

These nests are about 4 to 5 feet long and about 3 feet wide (1.2 to 1.5 meters long, and slightly less that 1 meter wide). The apes make them in the forest canopy, which can be between 30 and 60 feet (10 and 20 m) up, and it takes them only about 10 minutes to build. They use the nests only once, and then move on. The nests keep them warmer, away from insects and keep them safe, up off the forest floor.

http://www.livescience.com/19708-primates-build-sleeping-nests.html