Primatology.net

Alright, before I take you down this slippery slope of intellecuality, I wanna tell you that as I began reading this Salon.com article, “God and gorillas” I was thinking to myself, “What a load of crap! This is outrageous!” But as I read some more, specifically on the second page of the piece, that all changed. There are some outstanding and insightful observations on great ape behaviors that I thought some of you out there may enjoy reading up on. To those out there with no concept on the intellectual and emotional capabilities of great apes, I’ll try to document that with several quotes from this article.

In case you were wondering, the Salon.com piece is more in interview format than as an article. The author, Steve Paulson, interviews anthropologist Barbara King of the College of William & Mary who has worked with other primatologists like Jane Goodall and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. In her faculty profile, Dr. King says she is interested in the evolution of communication and cognition in primates. The scope of this interview is primarily to plug her new book, “Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion,” where King argues,

“[With] two decades [of] studie[s on] ape and monkey behavior in Gabon and Kenya, and at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo… [That] religion is rooted in our social and emotional connections with each other. What’s more, we can trace back the origins of our religious impulse not just to early cave paintings and burial sites 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, but much earlier — back to our ancient ancestors millions of years ago. And today, King says, we can see the foundations of religious behavior in chimpanzees and gorillas; watching our distant cousins can do much to explain the foundations of our own beliefs.”

Before you get all up in arms, defending the sanctity of separating religion and science, King states her interests in documenting religion is not geared to focusing on institutionalized religion. Rather, King tries to decipher how, who, what, when, where, and why primates have become so emotional and so spiritual. King answered one of the first interview questions, “Are chimpanzees and gorillas empathic creatures?” with,

“Yes, they are. Many people may remember an incident that happened 10 years ago at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. A female called Binti Jua was sitting with her gorilla family when a toddler tumbled into that enclosure, to the real horror of onlookers. Here’s this little kid lying on the pavement with these large gorillas. Binti Jua had an infant on her body. She walked over, picked up this human boy, carried him to the zoo staff and got him to safety. This has been interpreted by primatologists as empathy. She’s a mother who had youngsters; she saw that there was a hurt child and lots of very upset adults; and she solved the problem. “

And also, another aspect of empathy but on another level, King talks about how she has observed chimpanzees mourn the death of one of their group members named Tina,

“A chimpanzee female named Tina was killed by a bite to the neck by a leopard. She’d been living in a community of chimpanzees for quite a long time. The group didn’t just pull at her body or tug at it or ignore it. Rather, the dominant male of the group sat with her body for five hours. He kept away all the other infants and protected the body from any harm. With one exception. He let through the younger brother of Tina, a 5-year-old called Tarzan. That’s the only youngster who was allowed to come forward. And the youngster sat at his sister’s side and pulled on her hand and touched her body. I think this is not just a random occurrence. The dominant male was able to recognize the close emotional bond between Tina and Tarzan, and he acted empathically.”

This is behavior is so heartfelt to me. Even though I have had limited experiences with great apes, I have seen and felt they are empathetic organisms and am confident to say that applies all throughout homonoids. I wish I could comment on it a bit more, but I basically signed a non-disclosure agreement saying I can’t ever write about my experiences where I have gathered this conclusion.

Anyways, knowing how cohesive and social great apes are, I often wonder how they cope with death while in capitivity. As King mentions, many zoological institutions now allow fellow group members to see their recently deceased. Which shows to me how as caregivers to these organisms, our attitudes and approaches are changing towards the better. I wish all institutions will allow fellow living primate members see their dead… you know just to say goodbye.

After this section, the article takes a turn from primatology and into a discussion on paleoanthropology and interpretation of the progress of spirituality throughout the archaeological record. Those topics are geared more towards Anthropology.net, therefore I’ll avoid flooding this blog with that. I am deciding on whether I should publish that aspect of the interview over there, so keep your eyes open for something about the rest of this over at my other blog.

Suffice to say, I am humbly impressed. I thought this piece would be another moment where an anthropologist made some absurd claims on religion and tying it to evolution, but from what I have read of Dr. King’s research, I now have much more respect than I ignorantly assumed she will be saying. Her observations and conclusions are very intuitive and void of alterior religiosity fervor. I highly recommend you check out the Salon.com article… and maybe buy the book. I’m putting it on my wishlist and will buy it next time I make an Amazon.com purchase.

Again, many thanks to Betsy, who sent me a copy of the Science article over-viewing some of the ethics and current debate topics about the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research in the United States. The topic and scope of this piece is very poignant, it tackles two critical and morally charged topics in our lives: ecology and conservation versus public (human) health and biomedical research. The author successfully outlined many of the pros and cons behind both sides of the debate. I did appreciate what the article addressed, however it was a bit jumpy in organization. I will do my best to organize it in a more clear manner.

As that article points out, currently the United States of America is the only nation that continues to use chimpanzees for biomedical research. The last nation to use chimps, Japan, stopped using them in October of 2006… so it isn’t like the US is the only one that has been doing this for a long time. Over the last 100 years, chimps have proven to be a remarkable model organism to use for this type of research, one such example is the use of chimpanzee were critical in developing a novel vaccine for hepatitis B, a very lethal virus that has infected over 2 billion people. Their continued use in biomedical research has focused on developing a HIV vaccine, an equally devastating disease.

But, the future of HIV research, or other research dependent on chimpanzees as a model system is in jeopardy. The NIH, or National Institutes of Health, is the main supporter of biomedical research with use of chimpanzees. However, it has imposed a moratorium or ban on further breeding of chimps used in federally supported research. This has currently caused a significant drop in the number of chimps available for research, nearly 400 less chimps in the last ten years. A smaller supply of chimps creates a dramatic strain on the success and thoroughness of biomedical research. Furthermore, anyone with any background in genetics, would know a larger and more diverse population of breeding animals creates more healthy offspring. Of the remaining 1,000 chimps only 200 females are capable of breeding. This is the one main issue many proponents of biomedical research are concerned about, with fewer number of chimps available, their current and future research will be severely impacted… ultimately threatening the future of human health.

The NIH has imposed a ban on future breeding of chimps because a subdivision of the institution determined that a smaller population is more fiscally maintainable, and not because of the ethics and morals of using chimpanzees in biomedical research. But that hasn’t hampered the campaigns against this aspect of research. Someone who uses chimps and monkeys in biomedical research, specifically AIDS research, Jonathan Allan, of the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio, Texas summarizes the ethical catch 22 one must make,

“You shouldn’t be comfortable with [this type of research]. You should have to search your soul as to the balance between the research and the good that comes from it and the bad part, which is what happens to the animals. It’s a difficult place to be. If you’re comfortable with it and you don’t have any problem with it, that’s a problem.”

Norman Letvin, an immunologist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has also done AIDS vaccine experiments with chimpanzees and monkeys. He further comments on finding a clearly established set of rules and compromises that appease to ethical concerns as well as accomplishing successful research,

“These kinds of discussions need to be focused on very specific questions about a particular study.” Letvin no longer experiments on chimps and says he can’t see any compelling reason today to use large numbers of them for biomedical research. But he stresses, as do many other investigators, that this animal model has led to “enormously valuable” medical advances in the past and may well in the future.”

The crux of the campaign against using chimpanzees in biomedical research lie on several different foundations. Primarily, there is a large concern that this endangered species is disappearing from its natural ecosystem at an alarming rate. Most people would rather see efforts be made in conserving the species rather than infecting them with lethal pathogens and dosing them on drugs. I side to this issue just as much, if not more, than the use of them in biomedical research. Secondarily, as most of you may know, chimps are our closest living relatives. Genetically they are remarkably similar to us, and behavioral research has also shown that they have complex personalities, incredible intelligence, and a depth of familial relations that rival our own. To subjugate this keen species to invasive research that affects their lives in such deleterious manners is torturous.

Should the moratorium on chimp breeding be lifted, then as the article points out, that puts a burden on Chimp Haven and other non-profit chimpanzee rescue centers to support the ‘used’ chimpanzees. This draws a fine line in over what to do. It seems like both we as humans and they as chimps are screwed either way… Have we become so insensetive that we disregard our distant evolutionary cousins as if they were biological trash? If we do continue to use chimpanzees then how will we support them, and can we find an ethical common ground? UCSD’s Varki, Gagneux, and primatologist James J. Moore offer an interesting suggestion. They advocate in a 2005 commentary in Nature, titled, “The ethics of research on great apes,” “that chimpanzees should be used only in experiments that could also be done ethically in humans. That would rule out vaccine studies that intentionally infect animals with potentially harmful viruses, for instance.”

I would like to see researchers drop relying on chimpanzees for any type of invasive research, be it biomedical or psychological… we should focus our efforts in creating alternatives, such as supporting the Virtual Cell or other situations where the lab animals do not endure suffrage. We do have the technology to simulate diseases, and can focus on developing complex computer models that can figure out all the possibilities. Why don’t we do that? …Something to ponder about.

Some related and useful links on the history and campaign againt chimpanzees in biomedical research:

• NIH Chimpanzee Management Program (ChiMP) for Biomedical Research Chimpanzees
• Testimony on Biomedical Research and Chimpanzees by John Strandberg, D.V.M., Ph.D., National Center for Research Resources National Institutes of Health
• Tell the Government to Stop Funding Biomedical Research & Testing on Chimpanzees

John Cohen has contributed a little news focus in the current issue of Science, that I’d love to get my hands on. Unfortunately, my current university doesn’t have access to the latest issues of Science and from what I can read of Cohen’s news item, it really sparks my interests! It is titled, “The Endangered Lab Chimp” and here’s all you get as a visitor,

“A decline in the number of chimpanzees available for biomedical research in the United States has sparked a growing debate on the opportunities and costs of studies with our closest relatives.”

For me, this is a really heated debate. I personally have seen and read about some critical research done on chimps that have advanced biomedical research and in the long run bettered human lives… but I really am torn on the benefits versus the costs of subjugating chimpanzees to confinement and invasive medical torture.

I’d love to see what Cohen has to summarize about this debate and how the medical and biological communities are siding. Anyone with access to Science care to share it with me? You can email it, or upload it and link it up by commenting to this thread. Thanks!

Good news from WildlifeDirect‘s Senior Warden, Paulin Ngobobo: permission was granted to allow access to the Patrol Posts enabling the wardens to search for gorillas and establish current group status.

His most recent entry reads as follows (but be sure to check out his blog for more details documenting his efforts):

“Yesterday we finally managed to have a meeting with one of Laurent Nkunda’s rebel commanders. This meeting was to discuss the gorilla killings and to explain that this has to be stopped.

We set out with Rob Muir from Frankfurt Zoological Society at 0600 from Goma and teamed with MONUC Battalion Commander Lt. Colonel Rajeesh Parmar at 0800. Then we picked up a convoy of 3 UN patrol vehicles and one UN military observer (Milobs) armored vehicle and headed out for Jomba. This is one of the key gorilla sites close to the Uganda border where the rebels have their headquarters.

Shortly after our arrival at 10.30 a company of men came striding down the hilltop in camouflage gear – most of them carrying heavy weapons and rocket launchers. Quite a few were also carrying spears too. Myself, Rob, Lt. Col Parmar and Col Yav (of the Congolese army) met with Col Makenga of the rebel forces. Rob thanked MONUC for facilitating the meeting and thanked Makenga for agreeing to see us.

I was then able to talk with Makenga and Yav for about one hour, explaining who the rangers were, what we were trying to achieve in the park, and how important it is to protect the mountain gorillas and other wildlife even during times of war. I requested access to the Patrol Posts in the gorilla sector so that my rangers could search for the gorilla groups and establish their status.

Col. Makenga granted my request. The rebel commander’s pledge gives us some hope, and I will be carrying out our first patrols from Bikenge next Tuesday.”

Reading his first hand accounts of life as a Congolese Warden has put many things into perspective for those of use who work in ex-situ conservation (and everyone for that matter)… encounters with armed forces are certainly not everyday occurrences for most of us. Thank you and good luck to Paulin and his team!

If you’re interested in paleoprimatology and phylogeny at all, a new paper in PNAS titled, “New Paleocene skeletons and the relationship of plesiadapiforms to crown-clade primates” has just come out. If you don’t know Plesiadapiforms are archaic primates who lived in the Paleocene. The study focuses mostly on the initial divergence of primates, and uses some new Paleocene plesiadapiform skeletons for their analyses. And the authors conclude that these plesiadapiforms fall in line with Euprimates and indicate that the divergence of Primates from other euarchontans happened right around the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary or 65 million years ago. Here’s the abstract where I got these conclusions from, once I’m at school, I’ll print off the article and read it in my free time,

“Plesiadapiforms are central to studies of the origin and evolution of primates and other euarchontan mammals (tree shrews and flying lemurs). We report results from a comprehensive cladistic analysis using cranial, postcranial, and dental evidence including data from recently discovered Paleocene plesiadapiform skeletons (Ignacius clarkforkensis sp. nov.; Dryomomys szalayi, gen. et sp. nov.), and the most plesiomorphic extant tree shrew, Ptilocercus lowii. Our results, based on the fossil record, unambiguously place plesiadapiforms with Euprimates and indicate that the divergence of Primates (sensu lato) from other euarchontans likely occurred before or just after the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary (65 Mya), notably later than logistical model and molecular estimates. Anatomical features associated with specialized pedal grasping (including a nail on the hallux) and a petrosal bulla likely evolved in the common ancestor of Plesiadapoidea and Euprimates (Euprimateformes) by 62 Mya in either Asia or North America. Our results are consistent with those from recent molecular analyses that group Dermoptera with Scandentia. We find no evidence to support the hypothesis that any plesiadapiforms were mitten-gliders or closely related to Dermoptera.”

Check out some other resources on Plesiadapiforms and primate evolution here:

• Fossil Remains: The Plesiadapiformes and the Origins of the Primate Order
• Primate Taxonomy, Plesiadapiforms, and Approaches to Primate Origins

I’ve cross posted this over at Anthropology.net, just in case.

I’m extremely humbled by and welcome the cohesive comments shared by Paulin Ngobobo & Patty Hoaglund, on the on going tragedy of mountain gorilla killings in the Congo, it breaks my heart to share with you more upsetting news.

National Geographic News shares with us some words and pictures of the the killings, “Mountain Gorillas Eaten by Congolese Rebels.” They preface their piece with a disclaimer saying, “Warning: This story contains a graphic image that may be disturbing to some readers.” And with no doubts what you will see and read there is horrific, but, to those of us who have been tracking this news,what we read there is nothing new.

Instead, I am sharing with you an image because I do hope that this photograph will extend farther than what our community currently reaches out too. This tragedy is horrific. More people need to see this.

The remains, including the head, feet, and skin, of a mountain gorilla called Karema were found recently dumped in human excrement in a pit latrine.

Karema is the second mountain gorilla killed and eaten by rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo this month, raising fears that a mass slaughter of the critically endangered animals is underway.

Photograph courtesy WildlifeDirect

Photo by Amy Fultz

Despite all residents receiving vasectomies prior to arrival at Chimp Haven, the caregivers stumbled upon a surprise yesterday morning… a healthy baby chimpanzee in the arms of her mother.

Chimp Haven reports that their next step is to determine paternity and address the failed vasectomy.

This is an interesting occurrence given the recent management allegations Chimp Haven has faced (discussed in previous posts/comments from Kambiz and DAB). The chimps (Teresa and the father, unknown at this time), sound like they are doing well at Chimp Haven, as successful breeding has generally been seen as a sign of good behavioral and physical health.

With only around 700 mountain gorillas left in the whole world now, and more than half of them in Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, it is upsetting to hear that, “Congolese rebels have shot and butchered,” one of these individuals. This news comes from Reuters‘ “Congo rebels kill rare ape, raising survival fears.”

Ian Redmond, chief consultant for the United Nations Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP) takes the subjectivity of this tragedy out of context, and outlines how,

“In a population this small, every individual counts — and the loss of a trusting young silverback is tragic on many levels.”

Robert Muir, of the Frankfurt Zoological Society adds how the conflict between humans is affecting to non-humans,

“The future survival of this species is now under threat, and I fear that this recent attack on the gorillas could signal a wave of such killings if immediate action is not taken to remove Nkunda’s and his troops from their habitat.”

The gorilla was actually killed not too far off from a post that was abandoned by wildlife protectors because they were driven off by violence. It is really trivial to think these rebels killed this gorilla for no apparent reason, other than to show their ignorance in dominance over these species that are being protected by a regime they do not support.

In an interesting and bold research move in Australia, dubbed the Human Zoo, humans have been put on display at the Adelaide Zoo. Dr. Carla Litchfield, a lecturer in psychology at the University of South Australia, will be monitoring her volunteers as they are housed in an unused orangutan enclosure for about a month. Groups of six are housed in the enclosure for a week at a time… including Dr. Litchfield.

The daily activities range from enrichment activities to veterinary check-ups, with visits from special guests (“Zoo-loopers”) on the weekends. Footage is available via web cam from Saturday through Thursday 9:30am to 5pm (Central Australian Daylight Time).

The project is intended to raise awareness about primate conservation, while the findings are intended to be a means to improve living conditions for captive apes. I must admit, I was a little surprised to see this research getting a chance to happen (I’m picturing the dozens of zoo meetings and mountains of IRB paperwork right now) and jealous that I am not a part of the research team collecting and analyzing the data. While comparative studies of life in a zoo versus life in a penitentiary are interesting, this project (however limited it is in time) puts humans in the same seat as the captive non-human primates from which we are learning so much. Hopefully this will go as planned and in the end, serve as a way to improve the quality of life for not just non-human primates, but all captive animals.

Earlier this week, my coworker, Betsy, who also blogs here at Primatology.org, handed me a short little press release. The press release discussed the role of anthrax in the devastating die-off of great apes in what was once one of the most dense areas of primates in the world. It is titled, “Sudden Great Ape Die-Off in the Periphery of the Dja Biosphere Reserve,”and comes by way of Patrick Guislain and Jef Dupain who later published, in the American Journal of Primatology (AJP), this paper, “Anthrax in Western and Central African great apes.” Here’s the abstract the paper,

“During the period of December 2004 to January 2005, Bacillus anthracis killed three wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) and one gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) in a tropical forest in Cameroon. While this is the second anthrax outbreak in wild chimpanzees, this is the first case of anthrax in gorillas ever reported. The number of great apes in Central Africa is dramatically declining and the populations are seriously threatened by diseases, mainly Ebola. Nevertheless, a considerable number of deaths cannot be attributed to Ebola virus and remained unexplained. Our results show that diseases other than Ebola may also threaten wild great apes, and indicate that the role of anthrax in great ape mortality may have been underestimated. These results suggest that risk identification, assessment, and management for the survival of the last great apes should be performed with an open mind, since various pathogens with distinct characteristics in epidemiology and pathogenicity may impact the populations. An animal mortality monitoring network covering the entire African tropical forest, with the dual aims of preventing both great ape extinction and human disease outbreaks, will create necessary baseline data for such risk assessments and management plans.”

The authors of the AJP paper used PCR, a way of amplifying genes, to screen for the presence of Anthrax genes from the bodies of dead primates. In their paper they tabulate the data from their assays, and show how they can differentiate between other apathogenic variants. They make a very convincing argument on the importance of tracking down the impact of anthrax because of its potential to lie dormant in the ground and infect for hundreds of years. That is crucial considering our best interests are to conserve and preserve these species for as long as we can; we don’t want another factor affecting that main goal.

All throughout last year we posted on how a virus, Ebola, has been decimating primates in the Congo… but we largely were unaware of the impact of other pathogens that are contributing to this die-of. As the authors of this paper advocate there is a necessity to understand other key players that are affecting the conservation of great apes.