{"id":3868,"date":"2019-06-20T16:39:13","date_gmt":"2019-06-20T16:39:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/?p=3868"},"modified":"2019-06-20T16:39:13","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T16:39:13","slug":"chimpanzees-at-the-crossroads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/2019\/06\/20\/chimpanzees-at-the-crossroads\/","title":{"rendered":"Chimpanzees at the crossroads"},"content":{"rendered":"

Research carried out by the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology<\/a> (DICE) into the impact of changes to chimpanzee habitats found they have adapted to human developments in a number of ways – including learning how to cross roads safely – but their survival is still threatened.<\/p>\n

A team of anthropologists from the\u00a0School of Anthropology and Conservation\u00a0and universities in Spain, in collaboration with the\u00a0Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary<\/a>\u00a0in Sierra Leone,\u00a0made their discoveries from hidden cameras during an eight-month study\u00a0in the African country.<\/p>\n

Although chimpanzees living in\u00a0fragmented habitats cross roads to move from one area to another\u00a0of their home range and may approach human settlements, any further road widening, tarmacking, or expansion and urbanisation could\u00a0significantly affect their distribution and abundance.<\/p>\n

Consequently, the research team suggests\u00a0care with infrastructure development, as well as developing agreements with farmers to allow\u00a0strategic fallow areas to regenerate into community-managed forest refuges\u00a0providing corridors for wildlife and vital natural resources and ecosystem services for both humans and wildlife.<\/p>\n

The research found that\u00a0chimpanzees do not avoid areas frequented by people, possibly due to human tolerance and low levels of hunting in the study area \u2013 but they did not visit areas humans use at midday when human activity was more prevalent.<\/p>\n

Around settlements, farmers grow fruits that\u00a0attract chimpanzees despite the risks of encounter with people. The cameras captured images of\u00a0chimpanzees eating domesticated fruits like mangoes and pineapples\u00a0that were cultivated close to human settlements.<\/p>\n

The research team used\u00a024 infra-red digital camera traps\u00a0deployed between 2015 and 2016 for a total of 8 months across 27 1.25\u00d71.25 km grids in the Moyamba district in south-western Sierra Leone.<\/p>\n

DICE expert in primate behaviour and one of the research team\u00a0Dr Tatyana Humle\u00a0<\/a>said, “If we want to secure their long-term survival, it is\u00a0crucial that successful protection measures should benefit people and chimpanzees alike. Conservation actions should focus on education and helping farmers to implement\u00a0alternative agricultural methods to slash and burn farming\u00a0and environmentally-friendly revenue generating activities to ensure coexistence between the two species.”<\/p>\n

In a landscape\u00a0heavily impacted by subsistence agriculture, with many swamps and minimal forest, the researchers found that\u00a0chimpanzees can survive if habitat loss is gradual, key wild resources such as the native oil palm are abundant, and if people are tolerant of their presence. However, chimpanzees in such landscapes tend to avoid roads, including untarmacked secondary roads, and prefer to range in close proximity to the swamps.<\/p>\n

Approximately\u00a060% of all world\u2019s non-human primates are threatened with extinction and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus<\/em>) face serious threats in West Africa, including death from disease, habitat loss, poaching and retaliation as a result of competition with people for resources.<\/p>\n

West Africa has one of the most fragmented tropical forest landscapes in the world due to high levels of deforestation. Chimpanzees in the region are\u00a0critically endangered\u00a0with the majority living outside protected areas.<\/p>\n

Factors influencing wild chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) relative abundance in an agriculture-swamp matrix outside protected areas<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by Rosa Garriga, Ignasi Marco and Encarna Casas-Diaz, Facultat de Veterin\u00e0ria, Universitat Aut\u00f2noma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; Pelayo Acevedo,\u00a0 Instituto de Investigaci\u00f3n en Recursos Cineg\u00e9ticos, Ciudad Real, Spain; Bala Amarasekaran Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Freetown, Sierra Leone; and Luna Cuadrado and Tatyana Humle, Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, is published in Plos One<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Research carried out by the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) into the impact of changes to chimpanzee habitats found they have adapted to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40284,"featured_media":3869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[159353,6599,124,70,6600],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3868"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40284"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3868"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3870,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3868\/revisions\/3870"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}