The Apes in the News page lists a summary and links to news articles that are relevant to the work of the Ape Alliance and ape conservation.
To see pages of the older articles, please scroll to the bottom of the page. Alternativaly, use the search facility below, to find a particular article.
- Apes are 'nicer' cousins of chimps - and very similar
- Bonobo apes evolved to be gentler and more playful
- Peaceful environment led bonobo females to favour sociable mates
- 'Self-domestication' could be common, say anthropologists
26/01/2012
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A new hypothesis holds that the natural selection produced the chimpanzee's nicer cousin in much the same way that humans bred dogs from wolves.
25/01/2012
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Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News | John Sterling | January 2012
The U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies should be congratulated for its thoughtful conclusions concerning the use of chimpanzees in a range of NIH research projects. After a careful and in-depth study of the issue, the IOM last month issued a report entitled "Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research: Assessing the Necessity."
24/01/2012
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Mate competition by males over females is common in many animal species. During mating season male testosterone levels rise, resulting in an increase in aggressive behavior and masculine features. Male bonobos, however, invest much more into friendly relationships with females. Elevated testosterone and aggression levels would collide with this increased tendency towards forming pair-relationships.
23/01/2012
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Eagerly he collects wood from the ground, snaps the branches into small pieces and carefully balances them in a pile. Then, taking care not to burn himself, he gently strikes a match and gets ready for a fry-up.
Like all red-blooded males, Kanzi loves messing around with a barbecue. But then, as these extraordinary pictures show, Kanzi is no man. He is a bonobo - pygmy chimpanzee - and his love of fire is challenging the way that we think about our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.
For although bonobo apes and larger chimpanzees use twigs and leaves as tools, none has ever shown such skill for cooking food.
30/12/2011
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PloS One | Erik Meijaard et al. | March 2011
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Abstract
Species conservation is difficult. Threats to species are typically high and immediate. Effective solutions for counteracting these threats, however, require synthesis of high quality evidence, appropriately targeted activities, typically costly implementation, and rapid re-evaluation and adaptation. Conservation management can be ineffective if there is insufficient understanding of the complex ecological, political, socio-cultural, and economic factors that underlie conservation threats. When information about these factors is incomplete, conservation managers may be unaware of the most urgent threats or unable to envision all consequences of potential management strategies. Conservation research aims to address the gap between what is known and what knowledge is needed for effective conservation. Such research, however, generally addresses a subset of the factors that underlie conservation threats, producing a limited, simplistic, and often biased view of complex, real world situations. A combination of approaches is required to provide the complete picture necessary to engage in effective conservation. Orangutan conservation (Pongo spp.) offers an example: standard conservation assessments employ survey methods that focus on ecological variables, but do not usually address the socio-cultural factors that underlie threats. Here, we evaluate a complementary survey method based on interviews of nearly 7,000 people in 687 villages in Kalimantan, Indonesia. We address areas of potential methodological weakness in such surveys, including sampling and questionnaire design, respondent biases, statistical analyses, and sensitivity of resultant inferences. We show that interview-based surveys can provide cost-effective and statistically robust methods to better understand poorly known populations of species that are relatively easily identified by local people. Such surveys provide reasonably reliable estimates of relative presence and relative encounter rates of such species, as well as quantifying the main factors that threaten them. We recommend more extensive use of carefully designed and implemented interview surveys, in conjunction with more traditional field methods.
17/12/2011
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