There is at least one example where almost exactly that happened, and we will talk about it in this article. Sure, we often see two animals fighting, even a smaller group of animals, but a big battle and a conflict that lasts for several months is not something you see every day. Additional funding and support for the project was provided by and The Lucie Burgers Foundation for Comparative Behaviour Research in Arnhem, The Netherlands, The Wasmoeth Wildlife Foundation, The African Wildlife Foundation and Karl Ammann.It is quite hard to imagine an all-out war between animals. The 2012 field season was carried out in collaboration with The Lukuru Wildlife Research Foundation, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and L’Institut Congolais pour La Conservation de la Nature. “Bili-Gangu's diverse mosaic of closed forest, wooded savannas and open grasslands, with its populations of chimpanzees, elephants, leopard and other large mammals, rare or extirpated elsewhere, represents one of Congo's most important opportunities for the establishment of a new conservation initiative within the Bili-Uéré complex”, says John Hart of the Lukuru Wildlife Research Foundation. It is recommended that wildlife guards be installed permanently in the region to avoid an escalation of poaching. According to the researchers additional field survey projects will need to be conducted so that future conservation activities can be directed to areas where they are most needed – before it is too late. “Without proper protection these chimpanzees may succumb to the same factors that are eliminating populations of the species elsewhere”. “Increasing numbers of bush meat carcasses and chimpanzee orphans were found in Bili and nearby areas”, says Christophe Boesch, director of the Department of Primatology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. While this chimpanzee population has remained stable over the last decade, the researchers have recently found signs that it is falling under increasing threat from the bush meat trade. “This population has remained unnoticed to researchers until now and may represent the largest viable population of this subspecies, but it currently lacks any protection.” When they re-walked parts of these transects again in 2012, the researchers found that the number of chimpanzee sleeping nests had not declined since 2005. “Our results suggest that a large and widespread population of chimpanzees inhabits the forests and savannas of northern DRC”, says Thurston C. Evidence of behavioral continuity shows that the north and south groups may be connected culturally as well. They covered a total of 1,800 kilometers of reconnaissance walks to the north and 500 kilometers to the south of the Uele River as well as 160 kilometers of line transects in the Bili-Gangu Forest, and discovered a population of chimpanzees numbering in the thousands. From the existing number of chimpanzee sleeping nests they can then estimate the total number of chimpanzees in this area.įrom 2004 to 2012, a research team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Amsterdam conducted chimpanzee surveys in the north of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a region where chimpanzee populations have never previously been systematically assessed. In order to determine the chimpanzee population size in an area the researchers traverse it at regular intervals along parallel line transects. “In order to monitor chimpanzee population trends and to decide where to best allocate conservation resources, it is crucial that we develop the means to accurately map the species’ distribution and make precise estimates of abundance”, says Hjalmar Kuehl of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Furthermore, chimpanzees often fall victim to poachers and are killed by human diseases. This has been a result of expanding agriculture in many African countries, as well as logging and the uncontrolled extraction of natural resources. Over the past two decades the African great apes have experienced a steep population decline, up to 90 percent in some regions. © Ephrem Mpaka, Lukuru Wildlife Research Foundation
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