Tag archives for Chimps
Young Female Chimps Play With Stick “Dolls”
Posted by All babies love to play and young chimpanzees are no exception. Researchers in Kibale National Park in Uganda have noticed something: young female chimps will play with sticks like they are dolls! “The stick serves no immediate function, they just carry it–sometimes for a few minutes, other times for hours,” says an e-mail by study leader Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University. “Carriers regularly take sticks into the nests they rest in during the day, something that isn’t done with other objects. Individuals are [also] known to play with their sticks while in their nests.”
Similar behavior has noticed with animals in zoos, too. Captive female monkeys have been noticed to prefer doll toys, while the males play with trucks.
Read more about baby chimps and their toys on National Geographic News
Get the facts on chimps in the Creature Feature.
Photograph by Michael Poliza, National Geographic/Getty Images
Chimpanzees are more like humans than researchers previously thought. In a new study performed in Japan, chimps helped other chimps get juice by passing them objects such as straws (to drink the juice) or sticks (to reach straws they couldn’t reach). Researchers noticed that related chimps were more likely to help each other.
The chimps were trained to use sticks or straws to get juice, but they were not trained to pass things to each other.
Find out more about the research on National Geographic News.
Get the facts on chimpanzees in this Creature Feature.
Watch a video of a chimp solving a computer puzzle on News Bites.
Photograph by Miriam Wessels/University of Veterinary Medicine, Hannover, Germany
Marina Davila Ross of the U.K.’s University of Portsmouth led a team that tickled the necks, feet, palms, and armpits of chimp, orangutan, bonobo, gorilla, and human babies. All of the babies responded to the tickling with laughter. The study says that the ability to laugh like this comes from an ancestor that humans and great apes have in common.
Watch a video and hear chimp, gorilla, and orangutan laughter on National Geographic News.
Get the facts on orangutans in the Creature Feature.
Get the facts on chimpanzees in the Creature Feature.
Dr. Goodall does not handle wild chimps. This orphan chimpanzee lives at a JGI sanctuary.
Photograph courtesy Michael Neugebauer
Jane Goodall, the well-renowned primatologist, has received the prestigious Leakey Prize for achievement in the fields of ape and human evolution. Dr. Leakey moved to the African jungle of Lake Tanganyika in 1960 to study chimpanzees, the closest living relatives of humans. Dr. Goodall has spent her career observing and documenting chimp behavior and working to conserve their natural habitats.
Dr. Goodall’s research showed us that chimpanzees use tools, hunt, and form complex family relationships. The Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation includes a conservation education program, Roots & Shoots, which works with young people around the world.
Want to learn more about chimps? Check out the Creature Feature.
Image courtesy PRI, Kyoto University
Kyoto, Japan
Ayumu the chimp probably has a better memory than you do! Ayumu, a chimpanzee at the Primary Research Institute at Kyoto University in Japan and three other chimps took the same memory test as college students. Numbers were flashed on a white screen, then turned into white squares. Test-takers then had to touch the squares in the correct order. Ayumu outscored the college students and the other chimps!
Watch a video of Ayumu completing the memory test.
Featured in National Geographic Kids magazine, October 2008
By Heather E. Schwartz
