Archive for December 7th, 2006
Growing up Gorilla at Lefini Faunal Reserve
From Pharyngula, I got this image of a orphaned baby gorilla holding a human hand at Lefini Faunal Reserve. It is actually from 1998. Dates aside, this photo effectively captures the emotions of “bush-meat orphans,” young gorillas whose mothers are illegally killed by poachers for meat, without showing face.
In case you wanted to put this awesome image as your desktop here’s a link for the highest resolution image, 1024×768.
Reports of a mysterious chimpanzee epidemic at Bossou Environmental Research Institute
Some sombering news of a mysterious epidemic that has decimated a population of chimpanzees in one of Africa’s most important research sites for the primates has come out yesterday.
The research site, Bossou Environmental Research Institute (IREB), is in southeast Guinea. The Bossou chimps are one of the oldest permanent colonies identified by researchers in the wild… these are the chimps are known for using stone hammers to crack open palm oil nuts. Here’s what the head of the chimpanzee investigation, Pepe Soropogui has to say about this epidemic,
“no more than 12 West African chimpanzees remain from a population of around 30 in 2002.”
Marie Claude Gauthier of the Jane Goodall Institute for wildlife research and conservation added,
“There are theories that some chimpanzees have contracted a sort of bronchitis or pneumonia probably transmitted by man, but we are not sure because chimpanzees have funeral rites and take away the bodies after death.”
Read more about it here, “Mysterious epidemic may be killing Guinean chimps.”
Vote Monkey
Suffice to say, I have neglected this blog for the last several months. My excuses, in case you were wondering, were working on the weekends, 
taking 24 quarter units (around twice the normal class load), and trying to keep my other blogs running.
But I’m back, and I have invited others to co-blog here to make it a group effort. I have bookmarked lots of pages during my hiatus, and will try and get those posted as soon as finals are over!
In the mean time, to our right is a shirt that advocates we vote monkey, and this campaign gets my full support.
