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From a distance
Anthropologist Jill Pruetz doesn't get up close and personal with
her research subjects, but then she doesn't have to.
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An early morning start
is critical for Jill Pruetz as she continues her research project.
By six in the morning,
Pruetz and her research assistants are on the road, traveling an hour to get
to a local village. Typically they will walk five to six miles a day. And
the heat can be unbearable.
What does all that effort
get them?
"We'll walk around
and look at nests," the assistant professor of anthropology said. "We'll
take some data based on what we find in the nests."
The nests that Pruetz
and company are looking at are the evening homes of savanna chimpanzees in
the West Africa country of Senegal. Pruetz's project examines the behavior
of human's closest relative in a habitat similar to the one in which early
humans are thought to have evolved -one of the hottest, driest and most open
habitats used by chimpanzees today. Chimpanzees usually live in forests. These
live in a savanna habitat.
Pruetz estimates that
are only 500 savanna chimpanzees living in Senegal, about 25 inside a national
park near where she conducts her research.
But Pruetz is more interested
in the behavior of the chimpanzees that live outside the park's boundaries.
"In Senegal, humans
and chimpanzees co-exist in some areas," she said. "An immediate
goal of our project is to understand the success of the chimpanzee population
in areas inhabited by humans so that we can apply findings to the conservation
of chimpanzees elsewhere.
"As human populations
continue to increase across Africa, understanding how humans and chimpanzees
can peacefully co-exist will be a major contribution to conservation biology,"
Pruetz continued. "This study will reveal the effects of human influence
on these great apes' behavior and ecology."
Pruetz's research, which
is sponsored by grants from both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and
the National Geographic Society, indicates that the chimpanzees do as well
outside the Senegal National Park as they do inside.
"That's surprising
since the habitat outside the park is very degraded compared to the habitat
inside the park," she said.
A future aspect of her
research will focus on the increasing demand of humans of the region's fruit
- which is also the main food supply of the chimpanzees.
"People go out now
and extract about 75,000 pieces of fruit (during the two dry season months
when food is most scarce) from the chimpanzees' habitat," Pruetz said.
"This could result in a radical change in the environment."
The chimpanzees that
Pruetz is studying may be in parties of up to 15-20 individuals. Normally
chimpanzees will roam up to 40 square kilometers. The chimpanzees in Senegal
however, may have home ranges of over 200 square kilometers, making it difficult
for Pruetz to maintain contact with the same groups.
While humans and chimpanzees
co-exist peacefully in this section of Senegal, that doesn't mean that Pruetz's
expeditions into the chimpanzees habitat is met with universal acceptance
from those she is observing.
"Once you find the
chimps, they leave the area," Pruetz said. "They won't leave entirely
and we've been able to stay in contact with them for a couple of hours on
several occasions.
"The next four or
five years is very important to my research," she continued. "I'm
really interested in the area's ecology and there is much I can do without
directly observing the chimpanzees' behavior."
Around LAS
October 29 to November 4, 2001
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