Welcome

Hello everyone,

Welcome to our Budongo web log! In camp we were feeling a little guilty about being the only ones lucky enough to experience all of the interesting and entertaining stories that make up daily life here in the Budongo forest; so we thought we’d set up a blog so that everyone else could have as much fun keeping up with the Sonso chimps as we do! We hope that this helps all of our existing friends (and hopefully some new ones..) keep track of the characters they know and love, and meet a few others along the way. We’ve filled the site with lots of interesting features about not only the chimps, but also the research and other projects here at camp. So scroll down for the latest stories or have a look around the rest of the site, and don’t forget to let us know what you think!

Features:

Who’s Who – Check out our chimp profiles in the Sonso Who’s Who pages for the latest up to date information and pictures on the members of the Sonso Chimpanzee community.

Current Research - Check out the ongoing projects at the field site.

Local Projects – See how the project has extended it’s links through the local community.

Forum - Researcher or member of staff? Enter the discussion area to see what the hot topics in field research are!

Risky business – stranger females get a mixed reaction from the Sonso community

Nambi, her daughters Nora and Night, and the young sub-adult male Zalu are travelling together in the south when they hear calls near by; immediately nervous, they stop and glance around. Suddenly two strange females appear: an older adult and a young sub-adult who is in swelling, a sign that she might be coming into her fertile period. Nambi and her daughters seem relatively uninterested, but Zalu is keen to check out this attractive young newcomer and moves over to sit near the younger female.

It’s quite unusual for a strange adult female to be found in another group’s territory without being in swelling; chimpanzees can be highly territorial – brutally attacking and sometimes killing strangers that stray across into their community area. To the local females any new female represents competition for them and their offspring; however for the males, new females represent a new chance to mate. Arriving with the large pink genital swelling that signals the oestrus period is a way of attracting the favour and, by association, the protection of the community males. Straying across territory lines without it is a very risky move.

While the younger female is quite relaxed, the adult newcomer is clearly nervous and pant-grunts submissively to Nora; this seems to be the wrong move and Nambi suddenly starts to pant-hoot and scream loudly – a sure sign she’s trying to get the attention of other members of the Sonso community, not something that bodes well for the strange adult. Sure enough, within a few minutes the top two males, Nick and Musa, arrive displaying energetically. They move immediately over to the new female, but show no signs of attacking and after she pant-grunts to them they both relax.

While so far Nambi hadn’t seemed particularly bothered by the adult female, the fact that when the males turn up they appear to be accepting of this new potential competition doesn’t seem to be at all what she had in mind. She apparently decides she’s going to have to do something about this unwelcome visitor herself. The top female in the Sonso group, Nambi is a force to be reckoned with and she now attacks the strange adult, biting her in the back and leaving her bleeding. The males are still sitting on the fence; they don’t seem keen to drive off this potential new addition to their group, but they seem equally unwilling to risk incurring Nambi’s wrath by doing anything to defend the stranger. After the attack the Sonso chimps start to move away, but although this gives the strangers a clear opportunity to escape they make the strange decision to follow the Sonso group. The young sub-adult female with her swelling gets plenty of attention and avoids any real hostility, but again the adult female is not so lucky. Another big male, Zefa, arrives and starts to attack her, this time everyone joins in and she is brutally beaten and dragged along the floor.

Over the course of the day other Sonso community members come and go – two more females Janie and Juliet arrive and the adult female is attacked for a third time. Not until 4pm, when the Sonso chimps are enjoying a last feed and starting to think about finding a nesting site for the night do the two strangers disappear back into the thick undergrowth.

While the male chimpanzee hierarchy has been well documented, we are only starting to get a glimpse of the complex social dynamics that govern female community structure. DNA based paternity research suggests that some females seem to copulate outside of their community on a regular basis and observational work has shown how peripheral community females seem to juggle membership of several communities. Days like this one highlight just how little we understand about the complex social lives of our forest cousins. What could have motivated the adult female to visit a neighboring group when she wasn’t in oestrus? And why stay after the first, or second attack? What was her relationship to her young companion? Why did Zefa (the gamma male) attack her when the top two males had not – was he trying to curry favor with the powerful Sonso females? The only thing we can be certain of is that more research is required, and that we are more than happy to keep searching for the answers!

Budongo chimps provide new evidence for the debate on chimpanzee culture

Is culture uniquely human? Many people would instinctively answer yes, but there is now a well established body of research that questions whether we may be wrong to assume this. Over the years a number of behaviours have been proposed as the answer to the puzzle of what makes us human – planning, tool use – all have fallen by the wayside as observations of their use by other species ruled them out. In recent years some of the hottest scientific debate has centered around the question of culture. Frequently hindered by the lack of agreement over what exactly culture is, there is still no doubt that the debate has stimulated exciting observations and experimental research in species that range from chimpanzees to crows. Some primatologists argue that there are group-specific behaviours seen in chimpanzees that can not be explained away by ecological or genetic factors; these must be transmitted socially from generation to generation, and that this constitutes a form of culture.

Observations such as the nut-cracking in wild west African chimps inspired a body of experimental research – now Sonso PhD researcher Thibeaud Gruber has added to the debate with new evidence recently published in the journal Current Biology. He and his colleagues present the findings from a series of experiments conducted with two Ugandan chimpanzee communities: one in Kanyawara and here with our own Sonso group. Both groups are the same sub-species of chimpanzee and live in similar forest environments but show some interesting behavioural differences. Kanyawara chimpanzees regularly use stick tools to extract honey, a behaviour never seen at Sonso. When both groups were presented with the same controlled task of extracting honey from holes that had been drilled in logs, the Kanyawara chimps spontaneously manufactured stick-tools while the Sonso chimps used either their fingers or the leaf sponges that are normally used for collecting drinking water from tree holes. Given the absences of differences in genetic or environmental factors, the researchers concluded that the chimps must be relying on their local cultural knowledge to solve the new task.

For more information the full article is currently available in the online journal of Current Biology as: Gruber et al. 2009. Wild Chimpanzees Rely on Cultural Knowledge to Solve an Experimental Honey Acquisition Task.

Hawa heads for the top..

Over the years we’ve seen Hawa grow from a shy sub-adult male into a more confident member of the male hierarchy, but he has always been a laid-back easy going individual who with his long limbs and dark face was almost more reminiscent of a bonobo than a chimpanzee. He was still very much dominated by the other young males of his own age such as Squibs and Kato and could often be found hanging out with the younger juveniles.

The recent increase in hunting over the past 18months revealed another side to his personality; a very keen hunter he was often to be found up in the trees chasing the black and white colobus monkeys through the high canopy. Sadly for him though his low rank meant that even when he caught the monkeys he rarely got to keep any of the meat and instead would spend hours begging for the smallest scrap of bone from the adults.

Whether or not it was this newfound interest in hunting that awakened his competitiveness or whether it was just his ‘time’ a radical change has happened. His body started to fill out and as those long thin arms suddenly bulked up everyone else in the community started to sit up and take notice of just how big a chimp he has grown into. He started to display at everyone apart from the top three adult males and even when the alpha Nick came crashing through with one of his typically boisterous displays sending other chimps scattering, Hawa barely batted an eye-lid. Now having dominated his old rivals such as Squibs and forged new alliances with young females like Nora, he has risen to the 4^th ranking position and a couple of weeks ago succeed in holding on to a monkey even when the alpha male Nick started to display at him. At the time Zefa seemed almost to assist him by leaning over him, and while Nick eased off momentarily Hawa seized his moment and took off with the meat. Nick and Zefa were quick to chase after him, pant-hooting and drumming loudly but all to no avail – Hawa was long-gone. We’re sure getting to pick at the choicest bits of his dinner in peace will only encourage him to continue in his new political career!

Success at the Chimp Health Workshop but tragedy in the Sonso Chimpanzees

 

Hello, sorry for the lack of news recently, BCFS has been a busy place with the Great Ape Health Workshop coming together at the end of August. A great success with close to 100 participants it generated indepth discussions on everything from the prevention of ape-human disease transmission to the control of out-breaks. One of the major successes of the workshop was the instigation of a nation wide health monitoring program that will be based on the BCFS program. This will run in conjunction with an Africa-wide comparison of study sites looking at aspects such as the effect of human presence on parasite or bacterial loads and immunities. 

 

There was plenty of activity in the chimp community too – after a successful start to the year with new births and immigrations we sadly lost Bwoba and then Zimba’s new baby boy. Things seemed to settle for a while but after being absent for a few weeks Juliet one of our youngest adult females returned to great commotion. She had brought with her her first baby, a tiny boy only 1-2weeks old. The initial joy at this new arrival quickly turned to horror as we watched Nick (our alpha) and Musa rush over and start to display and then chase Juliet through the trees. Her screams brought many of the other communities members rushing over, some (including most of the other adult males) seemed to try and defend her but Nick finally succeeded in driving mother and baby down to the ground where he started to attack them. She was desperately trying to shelter the baby under her but in a moment’s lull Nora rushed over and grabbed the baby from her arms. This is not the first time Nora has tried this with a new infant, she tried and failed to take Kigere’s new baby when she arrived at the start of the year, and has recently taken to carrying many of the older babies around. She is almost at the age to have her own babies and we’d credited much of this behaviour down to a sort of broodiness. Tragically in this case she attacked the young infant – biting it in the neck. Once Nick realised that Juliet no longer had the baby he left her alone and rushed to take it from Nora; they then both started to cannibalize the body. Juliet ran away, and the baby’s dead body was passed through the community with many of the younger ones carrying or playing with it. Sally kept trying to build tiny nests and put the body in them, almost like a doll. 

 

Incidents like this show us how much further we have to go in our understanding of chimpanzee behaviour. We managed to recover the body several days later and will try and establish the paternity. Did Nick attack because it was another Sonso male who had fathered the infant? Or a male from another community? Was there another reason entirely? In other incidents where a strange or rare female has returned with a new baby it was the adult females who have attacked her and the males who defended her. There are so many complex social factors involved in a case like this we a long way from going beyond a few simple hypotheses – however further investigation of this case and careful monitoring of any new ones may lead us over time to build up a more complete picture.

Another successful chimp rescue by the vet team.

On the 25th of June our resident vet, Tonny, received a phone call about a chimp caught in a mantrap in a village near our forest. Outside of the territory of our Sonso group it was almost certainly from the Rwensama forest fragment on the road to Hoima. Mantraps are hugely powerful spring loaded clamps and inflict the most horrific damage – the young female was found with her right leg trapped and screaming in agony. She was clearly in great pain and unlikely to survive long without intervention so the team swung into action. An expert in anesthetizing wild animals travelled up from the capital Kampala that day and early the next morning the chimp was darted and the trap removed. She had sustained a nasty compound fracture of the right tibia and with such a severe injury the only option with a chance of survival was amputation. The chimp was taken down to specialist facilities in Entebbe where a successful operation took place. She is now recovering nicely and in a few weeks will be released back into her forest where she can rejoin her community. Congratulations to the whole team for another fanastic rescue – to read more about snares and our snare removal program, click here.

Carefully crated up for the trip to Entebbe (photo T. Kidega)