Unique to human language is the capacity to flexibly recombine a limited number of sounds into words and hierarchical sequences, generating endlessly new sentences. In contrast, sequence production of other animals appears limited, limiting meaning generation potential. However, studies have rarely quantified flexibility and structure of vocal sequence production across the whole repertoire.

Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany used this approach to examine the structure of vocal sequences in chimpanzees, known to combine calls used singly into longer sequences. Focusing on the structure of vocal sequences, they analysed 4826 recordings of 46 wild adult chimpanzees from Taï National Park in Ivory Coast.

This study revealed that the chimpanzees produced 390 unique vocal sequences. Most vocal units emitted singly were also emitted in two-unit sequences (bigrams), which in turn were embedded into three-unit sequences (trigrams). Bigrams showed positional and transitional regularities within trigrams with certain bigrams predictably occurring in either head or tail positions in trigrams, and predictably co-occurring with specific other units.

From a purely structural perspective, the capacity to organize single units into structured sequences offers a versatile system, which is potentially suitable for expansive meaning generation. Further research must show to what extent these structural sequences signal predictable meanings.

Source: Nature
Photo: Unsplash/ Francesco Ungaro

The post Chimpanzees combine pant-hoots and calls to form vocal sequences appeared first on African Conservation Foundation.

Scientists first observed chimpanzees using tools more than half a century ago. As this complex behaviour appeared to differ across different populations, researchers concluded that tool use in apes was socially learned and therefore a cultural behaviour.

This was the beginning of exploring what behaviours in other species might be considered cultural as well. Killer whale pods and dolphins exhibit different dialects and use tools differently, for instance. Scientists have mostly focused on primates, however. Capuchin monkeys of Central and South America exhibit 13 variants of social customs, to take one example, while different orangutan populations vary their callsand the use of tools, nests or other objects. But no species has garnered more discussion on the presence, importance, and evolution of culture than chimpanzees.

 

Examples of chimpanzee culture range from social customs, such as the way they grasp their hands during grooming, to how males sexually display, to the type of tools used for cracking nuts or ant-dipping. An early study argued that there are as many as 39 different behaviours that are candidates for cultural variation. This set off an eager debate about whether animals have culture or not and how we would be able to detect it.

As in humans, cultural behaviours in chimpanzees are likely critical for individuals to demonstrate community membership. If a young chimpanzee in the Tai forest in the Ivory Coast wants to signal to a peer that they would like to play around, then they build a small, rudimentary ground nest and sit in it. In most other chimpanzee groups, ground nests are mainly used for resting.

Living with humans

But chimpanzees now face the daunting task of surviving in a habitat increasingly infested and assaulted by humans. And as their populations decline, so does their behavioural variation. In short, humans are causing chimpanzee cultural collapse.

Two of us (Alexander and Fiona) were involved in a new study which integrated data from 144 chimpanzee communities across Africa, and found the more that humans had disturbed an area, the less behavioural variants are exhibited by nearby chimpanzees. The results are published in the journal Science.

The actual mechanism behind this is not entirely known. The most obvious explanation is that increased human disturbance means there are fewer chimpanzees overall. Even those that remain have to be more inconspicuous in order to survive in areas where their food and nesting sites are threatened by logging operations, their water sources are polluted by miners, and they risk being hunted for bushmeat by poachers brought into their forests by newly-built roads.

 

All this forces the chimpanzees to forage in smaller groups and use less long distance communication like pan hoots and drumming on tree trunks. This likely leads to a decrease in the spread of cultural behaviours, as associating in smaller group sizes lowers the chance of learning socially from one another.

Chimpanzees have also been observed to adapt to human disturbance by inventing new coping mechanisms such as eating human crops. But despite these rare adaptations, overall human activity is vastly erasing the rich behavioural diversity that now characterises chimpanzees.

Chimpanzee monoculture

But, if the species is gradually merging into a single cultural entity that stretches all the way from Senegal to Tanzania – why does this matter? After all, monocultural species are not inherently problematic. There is no direct relationship between cultural diversity and species distribution, for example. Flies, rats and crocodiles are all disseminated across a vast area, and yet have not yet been described as cultural. Losing chimpanzee behavioural diversity doesn’t itself threaten the species survival.

Losing diversity could be representative of larger issues, however, not least that the species is on the decline, which is the worst scenario. For example, we don’t yet know how adaptive these behaviours are. A loss of behavioural diversity could represent compromises in how animals respond to selection pressures like changes in food availability and how they adapt to climate change.

The risk is that we humans are irreversibly endangering a unique chance to discover the full extent of cultural diversity in our closest living relatives. When scientists discover a new group of wild chimpanzees it often exhibits unique behaviours that have never been observed previously, and it is hard to know what would be eradicated before we know about it.

If things continue as they are, the opportunity to study common evolutionary roots with our own species might soon be forever lost. Making protection of cultural diversity a conservation priority, which extend to numerous other species, would help to ensure the survival of our extraordinary primate heritage.

Alexander Piel, Lecturer in Animal Behaviour, Liverpool John Moores University; Fiona Stewart, Visiting Lecturer in Primatology, Liverpool John Moores University, and Lydia Luncz, Research Fellow, Primate Models for Behavioural Evolution Lab, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post A chimpanzee cultural collapse is underway, and it’s driven by humans appeared first on African Conservation Foundation.

The African Conservation Foundation (ACF) and Environment and Rural Development Foundation (ERuDeF), in collaboration with the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife (MINFOF-Cameroon), have since 2004 been working together to secure the long-term survival of the last great apes populations in the Lebialem Highlands. This collaboration led to creating the Tofala Hill Wildlife Sanctuary in 2014, the creation of two out of the four ear-marked community forests in the Tofala-Mone Wildlife Corridor and currently supporting the creation of the proposed Mak-Betchou Wildlife Sanctuary.

Collectively, the Tofala-Mone Wildlife Corridor and the proposed Mak-Betchou Wildlife Sanctuary host over 600 Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees, 40-60 Cross River gorillas, over 100 African forest elephants, populations of Drills, Preuss monkeys, and a host of other globally threatened species that include amphibians, flora and birds. The collective surface area of these three conservation areas stands at 48,163ha.

An increasing number of Cameroon Nigeria Chimpanzees are being captured on camera traps in the Tofala Hill Wildlife Sanctuary. During the last survey in this sanctuary, a large group of 20 chimpanzees was caught on camera trap footage.

This survey, according to ERuDeF’s great apes researcher Gwendolyn Angwa, is an indication that the population of chimpanzee in the area is increasing. “The common size of groups of Nigeria Cameroon chimpanzees is between 4 to 12 individuals. Most of their habitat is fragmented and there is competition for food and mates. In other chimpanzee subspecies, living in other parts of Africa, group size can vary between 2 to 150 individuals.”

The number of chimpanzee is growing as a result of increased birth rate. There is also possible influx of animals from the Mone Forest Reserve through the creation of the Tofala Mone Corridor which we are developing. Groups of chimpanzees can merge to form larger groups when human encroachment, hunting and threats are reduced and food availability is increasing.

Monthly surveillance and patrols are carried out by Government and community rangers which often last 15 days in a month. To this end 6 hunters in the forest adjacent communities have been recruited and trained to participate in forest surveillance and patrol – converting them into conservationists.

According to Forest Research officer Floribert Assongacap, a notice has been issued to all farmers having farmland in the forest to move their farms out of the forest. Alternative sources of income have been developed with local community members by providing training and donation of piglets and bee hives, as well as training of women groups on soap and detergent production.

Snaring, expansion of farmlands and human-wildlife conflicts remain the biggest threats to the chimpanzees, Cross River gorillas and other wildlife in the area. Many cases of plantain destruction by great apes have been recorded in the area. Fortunately, hunting gorillas and chimpanzee in communities around Tofala is a taboo. The local communities involved in the project include four principal ethnic groups namely the Bangwas, Mbos, Mundanis and the Banyangs. According to their culture and traditions, great apes are regarded as totem animals.

Snaring however is a serious problem. “Snares are set in the forest for small mammals such as rats and porcupine, but this turns to injure non-targeted species like the chimpanzee and gorillas,” says Gwendolyn Angwa. “In one of the videos recorded in the last survey, we noticed a chimpanzee with a broken arm and it’s certain that is a result of snares.”Get involved and help the chimpanzees and Cross River gorillas in South West Cameroon. The current Cameroon crisis threatens great apes as displaced people flee to protected areas, clearing forests to build homes and hunting endangered animals for survival.

The situation is so critical that Louis Nkembi, founder ERuDeF and Board Member of the African Conservation Foundation, believes the government should declare an ecological emergency. “In the Lebialem highlands, elephants have been liable to poaching. Now with the crisis, the activity has skyrocketed,” he says. “Endemic endangered apes of Cameroon, especially gorillas and monkeys too are being decimated.”

We can stop the extinction of great apes wildlife – but we need your support. Please donate today so that we can take action now. You can also join us as a volunteer in Cameroon.

The post Large groups of Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees captured on camera trap footage in Tofala Hill Wildlife Sanctuary appeared first on African Conservation Foundation.

Humans routinely adjust communication to take into account information that they know is available to their audience, an ability assumed to be absent in other animals. This assumption may be premature. Recent studies show changes in primate alarm signaling to threats according to receivers’ risk. “A major confound in assessing animal mind reading capacity, however, has been eliminating the possibility of subjects reading the behavior rather than the minds of the others”, says Catherine Crockford of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “Here, we overcome this confound by using a new experiment with a call played from a loud speaker to simulate the receiver. This means that there is no possibility for behavioural cues, other than the call itself.”

The researchers designed experiments to exclude concurrent reading of receivers’ behavior by simulating receivers using pre-recorded calls of other group members. Specifically, they tested whether wild chimpanzees emitted differing signals in response to a snake model when simulated receivers previously emitted either snake-related calls (indicating knowledge), or acoustically similar non-snake related calls (indicating ignorance). “As chimpanzees walked along a path they first heard the playback of a chimpanzee call and then as they continued to walk along the path, they saw a snake model”, says Crockford. “The playback was either a call associated with snakes, indicating the caller was aware of the snake, or a similar call not associated with snakes, indicating the caller was not aware of the snake.”

Crockford, Wittig and Zuberbühler found that chimpanzees changed their behavior at the snake depending on the call type that they had heard some seconds earlier. They found that chimpanzees not only monitored receivers’ awareness of a threat but also changed their communication depending on the receivers’ awareness of the threat.

The researchers conclude, chimpanzees are aware enough of another’s perspective to target information towards ignorant group members, suggesting the integration of signaling and socio-cognition systems was already emerging in early hominoid lineages, before the advent of more language-specific features, such as syntax. Crockford says: “Our results demonstrate that chimpanzees have achieved a crucial step within the evolution of language previously thought to be absent in all non-human communication – to fill another’s knowledge-gap.”

Source:
Max Planck Institute

The post Chimpanzees adjust communication to fill another’s knowledge gap appeared first on African Conservation Foundation.

The proposal for the park’s creation was jointly made by the Office Guinéen des Parcs et Reserves (OGuiPar) and the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation (WCF), and followed an extensive inventory in 2012 of all protected areas of the country including the province of the Foutah-Djallon. This confirmed that Guinea has in the region of 17,000 chimpanzees, by far the largest population in West Africa. However, many of these populations are small and isolated. The area of the Moyen-Bafing, overlapping with the prefectures of Tougué, Koubia, Dinguiraye, Dabola and Mamou, encompasses seven classified forests with what now constitutes the largest continuous population of this critically endangered sub-species in West Africa, and one of the largest on the African continent.

The Director-General of the OGuiPar, Colonel Mamady Keita said: “It is a great day for nature conservation in Guinea. The creation of a national park will contribute to the protection of this important sub-species, while allowing our Government to come closer to our objectives, as outlined during the 10th Conference of the Parties of the Biodiversity Convention held in Nagoya, Japan, in October 2010. ”

The proposal to create the park resulted from a long process during which detailed data on the distribution and abundance of animal sub-species living in the area, as well as data on the demography and the socio-economy of the local communities, were gathered. An initial stakeholder engagement process was conducted to inform the communities about the benefits and potential implications of this project on their livelihood. In addition, national workshops were held to inform the national and local partners about the project, who then validated the provisional park limits.

Professor Christophe Boesch, President of the WCF said: “When I first arrived in the Moyen-Bafing in 2014, I was impressed by the high number of chimpanzee nests we found along the gallery forests. Then, coming out of a ravine, we heard numerous chimpanzee alarm calls and saw 24 individuals slowly moving away from a pool, while looking back at us. Once at the pool, we noticed they had been fishing for algae deep in the water with twigs they had left behind – a skilled solution to feed, while at the same time covering their need for water during the dry season. This tool use is unique to the chimpanzees in the Moyen-Bafing.”

The WCF engaged with two mining companies, Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée (CBG) and Guinea Alumina Corporation (GAC), a subsidiary of Emirates Global Aluminium, about using the Moyen-Bafing area as an offset to compensate for the residual impacts of their mining operations on chimpanzees. CBG has received financing from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, and IFC is considering an investment in Guinea Alumina Corporations’ Sangaredi bauxite mine. Both companies are committed to implementing conservation activities that will result in a net gain in the chimpanzee population proportional to the numbers impacted in the mining concession. By working with CBG, GAC and IFC, the Moyen-Bafing national park will now receive the financial resources it requires for its activities to protect and rehabilitate the forest environment. This is an excellent example of a collaboration between the Government, the private sector and an NGO to achieve the long-termSet featured image protection of a globally important site for the West African chimpanzee.

The Minister of Environment, Eaux et Forêts, Madame Aissiatou Balde said that:  “This park represents a unique chance to contribute to the protection of the West African chimpanzee and, with specific actions, restore the vital function of water in the environment, contributing to an improvement in the living conditions of the communities directly affected by the decrease of rainfall and uncontrolled deforestation.” The next steps are that OGuiPar and WCF will conduct a series of studies including an in-depth socio-economic impact assessment and carry out a process of informed consultation and participation with communities throughout the set-up phase of the park to ensure full understanding of the trade-offs and potential livelihood changes. This will culminate in the official Decret for the national park in approximately two years with the broad support of the communities.

Christophe Boesch added that: “After the disappearance of so many chimpanzees over these past few years in West Africa, we all hope that this important move by the Government of Guinea will signal the start of specific measures to sustainably protect the environment in the region for the good of the chimpanzees and the local human populations who are everywhere being confronted by the negative consequences of climate change.”

“The creation of this national park, comes after many years of effort by the IFC and the WCF as well as CBG and GAC,” said Rene Fontaine, GAC’s Environmental and Social Impact Assessment Delivery Manager. “Founding the national park is just the start of a long and worthy journey towards protecting the habitat of the Western chimpanzee, so that this globally-important sub-species can increase in number and thrive in Guinea.”

For more information:

Colonel Mamady Keita, DG de l’OguiPar, Conakry, Guinea. Tel: + 224 62 25 46 290, Email: sayba58@gmail.com

Prof. Dr. Christophe Boesch, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, and President of the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation. Tel: + 49 341 35 50 200, email: boesch@eva.mpg.de, wcf@wildchimps.org

Websites:

Ministère de l’Environnement, des Eaux et Forêts Guinée

Wild Chimpanzee Foundation

The post Guinea approves creation of largest sanctuary for the West African chimpanzee appeared first on African Conservation Foundation.