Since this wonderful experience, I am fascinated by the communicative complexity, intelligence and behavioral diversity of chimpanzees and other primates. After that, I started to investigate the communicative behavior of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) at the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, Kibale National Park in Uganda. I started my career as a field researcher in the Okavango Delta in Botswana studying baboons. Since 2019, I am the head of the research group Comparative BioCognition at the Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück. The habitat is breathtakingly diverse and the chimpanzees encounter their feeding competitors such as elephants, gorillas, red river hogs and different monkey species on a daily basis. Loango is the perfect place to study social behavior and ecological adaptations. How do they achieve this? To what degree is this adaptability related to social learning? Which cultural patterns might have evolved in this context? How do these adaptations help them to survive in a constantly changing habitat and numerous feeding competitors? To answer such questions at Loango, we make use of traditional behavioral observations as well as video, endocrinological, genetic and pathogen analyses, and camera trap recordings. What particularly fascinates me is the ability of chimpanzees to adapt to highly variable habitats a trait they share with humans. Over the course of the last twenty years, I was fortunate enough to observe wild chimpanzees at various sites across Africa including Taï in Côte d’Ivoire, Budongo and Ngogo in Uganda, Gombe and Issa in Tanzania as well as bonobos at Lui Kotale in the DRC. My research focuses on the behavioral ecology of great apes. Dominy,professor of anthropology and adjunct professor of biological sciences,Dartmouth.✾very time a chimpanzee population vanishes, we irretrievably lose a unique culture« Chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda, evaluate the edibility of figs. The study provides new insight into how chimpanzees exhibit advanced visuomotor control during the foraging process and more broadly, on the evolution of skilled forelimb movements. Palpating figs was about four times faster than detaching and then biting the fruit, suggesting that chimpanzees may have a substantial foraging advantage over birds and monkeys, which rely on visual and oral information. Based on the sensory data obtained, the team estimated the predictive power that sensory information may have on chimpanzees when estimating the ripeness of figs. Chimpanzees also use their sense of smell to assess individual figs however, the study was unequipped to capture olfactory volatiles. They observed the non-selection, rejection and ingestion of individual figs, and collected specimens of figs that were: avoided palpated and rejected palpated, bitten and rejected and edible for which less than 50 percent of the fruit was left. The team examined the spectral, chemical and mechanical properties of figs, which included boring into individual figs to assess the elasticity of the fruit and extracting fig contents to estimate nutritional rewards such as sugar.
Sensory assessment entailed incisor evaluation to discern toughness (chewability).
Colobus monkeys do not have thumbs and evaluate the ripeness of figs by using their front teeth.Ī chimpanzee in Kibale National Park, Uganda, initiates a series of sensory assessments to evaluate the edibility of figs. To determine if the green figs of Ficus sansibarica are edible, chimpanzees ascend trees and make a series of sensory assessments- they may look at the fig's color, smell the fig, manually palpate or touch each fig (using the volar pad of the thumb and lateral side of the index finger) to assess the fruit's elasticity and/or bite the fig to determine the stiffness of the fruit. The primates depended on figs, and although ripe figs come in a range of colors, many stay green throughout development and every phase can be present on a single tree, making it difficult to discern solely by color, which figs are ripe. These skills were the cognitive foundation for the origin of our extraordinary hands, a trait that made all the difference."įor the study, Dominy and his colleagues observed the foraging behaviors of chimpanzees, black-and-white colobus monkeys, red colobus monkeys and red-tailed monkeys in Kibale National Park, Uganda.
"A problem is that we know little about the selective pressures that favored the advanced manual skills of chimpanzees and other apes. Dominy, professor of anthropology and adjunct professor of biological sciences at Dartmouth. "The supreme dexterity of the human hand is unsurpassed among mammals, a fact that is often linked to early tool use," said lead author Nathaniel J.