It’s not the mining itself that’s destructive, he said, but rather, the culture around it. “They mine it in rivers, kind of like the way they mined gold in California – very low tech,” said Stanford, a biologist who spent years researching alongside primatologist Jane Goodall and is the author of Planet Without Apes and most recently The New Chimpanzee. Eighty percent of the world’s supply is found in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, “the last stronghold of the eastern lowland gorilla,” Stanford said, chair of the anthropology department at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. There’s an item in your pocket that is killing gorillas: the smartphone.Ĭoltan is an ore found in all sorts of everyday items, such as phones and Playstation consoles. Here are four unlikely things that could lead to never seeing great apes again. To do that, they must understand the threats they face. USC researchers, such as primate expert Craig Stanford, aim to understand how to better protect these animals. What’s more, apes are the only animals to share 99 percent of their DNA with humans. It’s possible that 100 years from now, species such as orangutans will be wiped off the planet entirely. RELATED ARTICLE: Human Speech Evolved From Lip-Smacking in Chimps, Study SuggestsĬheck out more news and information on Chimpanzees and Gorillas in Science Times.All great apes are considered severely endangered. Perhaps, studying further about these lethal attacks could give insights into the early human evolution. The observations had opened new doors for exploration and discovery on human's closest living relatives. Pika said that their team is still in the early stage of understanding the competition on interactions between chips and gorillas in Loango. The team thinks that the likely reason for the encounter could be competition for food sources rather than direct predation as observed on the dead infant gorillas, although the second one might have been eaten. Fruit trees in Gabon have been producing lesser fruit in recent years due to climate change. The authors suspect that the feud between the two species is no coincidence, IFL Science reported. Although during other times of the year, both chimpanzees and gorillas were friendly with each other. They pointed out that these encounters happened during the seasons when the diet of the two great ape species overlap heavily. The team investigated what caused the lethal attacks from the chimpanzees. The team noted that the aggressors of both encounters were male chimpanzees.ĪLSO READ: Like Humans, Chimps Also Prefer Less Friends Later in Life Why Did Chimpanzees Attack the Gorillas? The team found that the dead baby gorilla in the second encounter was almost entirely consumed by one adult chimpanzee female. Unfortunately, both first and second encounters resulted in one dead baby gorilla each and seven injured chimpanzees in the first encounter. The second encounter happened at the start of a suspected territorial boundary patrol. In the paper, they wrote that the first event happened after a territorial patrol in which males made a deep incursion into the neighboring territory of a group of chimpanzees. The second encounter lasted for 72 minutes, involving 27 chimpanzees that attacked a group of seven gorillas. Sky News reported that the first encounter lasted for 52 minutes and the party of 27 chimpanzees formed a group to attack a group of gorillas. They realized that the chimpanzees had encountered a group of gorillas in a fight. They noticed screams of chimpanzees and heard chest beats, which is a display characteristic of gorillas. Our colleagues from Congo even witnessed playful interactions between the two great ape species."īut in 2019, the team recalled that the first attack happened. "Interactions between chimpanzees and gorillas have so far been considered as relatively relaxed," says Professor Simone Pika said in a news release. "We have regularly observed both species interacting peacefully in foraging trees. Researchers from Osnabruck University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have been studying the behavior of around 45 chimpanzees in Loango National Park with a special group focus on the relationships within and between chimpanzee troops.
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