Great Ape Trust scientists congratulate ISU colleague on returning Fongoli chimp to mother

Des Moines, Iowa – February 25, 2009 – Aimee, a 9-month-old savanna chimpanzee rescued from the illegal pet trade in Senegal, has been reunited with her mother and an Iowa State University anthropologist is back home counting the things that went right while pondering what scientists can learn about empathy among great apes.

“This is the best resolution that we could have hoped for, and I can’t believe it turned out this way,” said Dr. Jill Pruetz, an associate professor of anthropology at Iowa State whose field study a group of chimpanzees traveling along Senegal’s Fongoli River has been supported financially by Great Ape Trust of Iowa and the National Geographic Society in the past, and  and is now supported by a Wenner-Gren Foundation grant for anthropological research.

Pruetz, who was honored by National Geographic as an “Emerging Explorer” after she documented the Fongoli chimps making and using spears to hunt bush babies in 2007, said she knows of no other similar reintroductions. But she believes “the likelihood of a baby chimpanzee actually being returned to its mother like this has to be a pretty rare occurrence.”

Dr. Benjamin Beck, Great Ape Trust’s director of conservation, thinks Pruetz and her team have documented a first.

“Having done an extensive survey of chimpanzee and gorilla reintroductions, I can tell you that pinpoint reintroductions of an infant separated from its mother to an established social group are rare, and success is even rarer,” he said.

Beck, the lead author of reintroduction guidelines for endangered great apes for the World Conservation Union (IUCN), said Pruetz and her field assistants approached the situation with the right mix of urgency and deliberation.

“The team reacted with incredible speed, which was essential to the reunion of the infant with the nursing mother,” he said. “But they were also very careful and deliberate, following every precaution and recommendation of the IUCN guidelines.”

“I don’t know of any other situation like this that was so remarkably successful,” said Dr. Robert W. Shumaker, director of orangutan research at Great Ape Trust. “I’ve known of other infants that have been reintroduced, but they didn’t survive. This was a unique set of circumstances – some of it good luck in that the baby survived the capture, and most of it skill and expertise on the part of Jill and her team – a perfect storm of circumstances that made it work.”

Often, stories of illegal hunting of endangered great apes don’t yield such an auspicious outcome, and Pruetz wasn’t expecting one during an emergency flight to Senegal on Jan. 26. In many cases, ape mothers don’t survive attacks to steal their babies for the pet trade – as Aimee apparently was, according to an emergency dispatch a few hours earlier by Pruetz’s field site manager, Dondo “Johnny” Kante.

Kante, who has helped manage the Fongoli field site for eight years, had recognized Aimee as part of the group Pruetz had studied when a high school-aged hunter approached him and asked if he wanted to buy the baby. Buying and selling endangered species is illegal, and Kante was able to persuade him to relinquish custody of Aimee to him. Even with the baby rescued from the pet trade, Pruetz told herself during the overseas flight that, at less than a year old and still nursing, the baby’s chances for survival would be slim without her mother – even if Pruetz and her team were able to return the baby to the group.

The morning after her arrival in Senegal, Pruetz and Kante discovered a large party of about 15 chimpanzees with a female they later determined to be Tia. The hunter Kante had confronted said a female chimpanzee that had been chased and bitten by dogs while he and a companion were hunting for warthogs left behind the baby, and the gashes on Tia’s body were consistent with such an attack. As Pruetz sprinted back to the hut to fetch the baby, Kante kept watch on the group.

The Fongoli chimpanzees are habituated, so Pruetz and another field assistant, Michel Keita, wrapped Aimee in a sack so the apes would not associate them with Aimee’s abduction. They carried her to an area about 30 feet from the large chimpanzee party, stood back another 25 feet and hoped for the best. What they witnessed was “some pretty amazing behaviors by the chimps,” Pruetz said.

Aimee remained in the sack watching the human party, then the chimp party, and then the human party again. In time, an adolescent male named Mike approached Aimee, smelled her, and then picked up the baby and carried her to the tree, where her mother retrieved her.

Pruetz followed the chimp party for the rest of the day. Tia stopped frequently to check her wounds, lagging behind the group. To Pruetz and her team’s surprise, Mike picked up the baby from time to time, carrying her for as long as 15 minutes at a time.

“Everyone was agog about that,” Pruetz said. “The fact that he came and picked Aimee up was one thing; that was very interesting, but it wasn’t necessarily unexpected. When mothers have died, there are instances where infants have been adopted by males and even alpha males.”

Pruetz has studied the Fongoli chimps for more than seven years and has observed Mike, who was orphaned around age 5, surreptitiously touching infants and “always being attracted to infants.” As Mike carried Aimee, “Tia wasn’t distressed at all that he had the baby,” Pruetz said.

She said Mike’s behavior in this situation offers a stark contrast to the stereotypical aggression in male chimpanzees.

“This is just as interesting,” said Pruetz, who plans a scientific publication on the chimps’ behavior during the reintroduction. “Empathy among great apes is still an unresolved question, and some people have no problem saying they exhibit some form of empathy. I think this is a clear case of empathy. But there’s always the other side, which highlights the paradigm primatologists have gotten into in looking at aggression, not affiliation, as the organizing feature [of primate society].”

Dr. Duane Rumbaugh, scientist emeritus at Great Ape Trust, said he believes that “empathy by the rescuer is one of the object lessons for us to take from this remarkable story.”

“Of course, the juvenile had empathy for both the infant and the mother,” Rumbaugh said without hesitation. “Cries of distress from the infant and surely angst in the mom would motivate him to do what he did: reunite mother and child.”

Rumbaugh, a pioneer in comparative psychology and the study of primate learning, intelligence and language, applauded Pruetz and her team on the successful reunion – and also extended his congratulations to the young male who recognized Aimee and returned the baby to its mother.

“It is fantastic that it should and would do so,” Rumbaugh said. “That it did so is not a trivial fact.”

Great Ape Trust’s Shumaker has tried to imagine the ordeal from the perspective of the baby’s mother, who witnessed and endured a range of human behavior in a period of a few days.

“Within a space of about five days, she was exposed to the very worst and the very best of how humans treat chimps,” said Shumaker, a champion in the campaign to end the exploitation of great apes by the entertainment and pet trade industries. “It’s interesting to think of it from her perspective: She saw humans steal her baby, she was injured by humans and a few days later, a different set of humans came back and reunited her with her baby. It’s kind of hard to grasp how she can understand that.”

Pruetz said the human hero in the story is Kante, the Fongoli field site manager. “He took control of the situation and got the baby away from the hunters,” she said. “In a worst-case scenario, that could have been risky. If he had been approached by the forestry department with a baby chimp in his possession, they could have supposed that he had taken her.”

Pruetz and her scientific colleagues hope the incident will increase outrage against the black market pet and bush meat trades throughout the ape range countries of equatorial Africa. Hunting of chimpanzees for meat has occurred for centuries, but a thriving world market for bush meat – the meat of animals from African forests – is now a major threat to the survival of chimpanzees and other endangered species.

“Apes need more protection than they have in the wild,” Rumbaugh said. “That hunters should take the infant is despicable.”

Pruetz and Kante have been meeting with forest officials in Senegal about multiple threats to the Fongoli chimpanzees, including habitat destruction, hunting, and the buying and selling of endangered species.

“It’s gotten to the point that there are some critical issues, and this is just one of them – probably a minor one, sadly,” she said. “This turned out to be a hopeful story, but it does illustrate that this is almost like kidnapping. I hope it draws attention to the problem.”