Chimpanzee Diet & Tool-use
Research included:
Ascertaining the role of ecological factors in explaining differences in extractive tool-use behaviour between chimpanzee communities.
Studying a previously unresearched chimpanzee community (Bugoma).
Conducting transects to compare chimpanzee food availability between two forests.
Comparing seed diversity and abundance in chimpanzee faecal samples between the forests.
Assessing how representative faecal samples are as an indicator of chimpanzee diet.
During the summer of 2017, I spent three months studying the diet and tool-use of chimpanzees in two Ugandan forests - Budongo and Bugoma. My research was generously funded by a National Geographic Young Explorers Grant and the Davies Expedition Fund.
I began in Budongo, a forest approximately 3 hours drive northwest of Kampala, en route to the renowned Murchison Falls National Park (East Africa's largest remaining mahogany forest and home to 600-700 chimpanzees). The chimps here are habituated, and the research station was frequently visited by chimps from both the Sonso and Waibira communities, who arrived to feed on mangos and figs. Less welcome were the baboons, who tried our tolerance with their determination to steal both equipment and food, and the rock hyraxes, who screamed us awake before dawn every morning.
The Sonso and Waibira communities are unique, in that they have never been observed performing extractive tool-use behaviour (e.g. using sticks to 'fish' for termites). The current hypothesis is that tool-use has been rendered redundant due to the abundance of fruiting trees introduced into the area by humans. It is suspected that this easily accessible food supply has removed the incentive for more strenuous methods of food gathering.
Bugoma , my second study forest, is significantly less protected than Budongo, and we encountered machete-wielding illegal loggers in the forest on a daily basis, although they always ran immediately, fearing that we were rangers. The chimps of Bugoma - the Kisindi community - are active tool-users, sadly, they are also routinly injured by snares, intensly distrustful of humans, and almost completely unresearched. I set out to determine the variety of fruiting trees present in Bugoma, to see if their tool use might be explained by lower fruit availability. I stayed in a rural village home with a couple and their four young children whilst studying the Kisindi chimps. Paper-thin walls and restless toddlers made sleep a rare luxury, although my repertoire of Ugandan lullabies increased significantly.
