Researchers getting the poop on poop

Des Moines, Iowa – January 27, 2010 – When researchers studying the 14 chimpanzees isolated in the Gishwati National Conservation Park wanted to know more about their ecology than they could glean through observation, they looked to the forest floor for answers.

DNA analysis from fecal samples collected from the 14 Gishwati chimpanzees will tell Dr. Rebecca Chancellor and her field research staff about the great apes’ relationships to one another, including parentage, the degree of inbreeding within the community and genetic similarities with other nearby populations as the Gishwati Area Conservation Program enters its third year in Rwanda.

The Gishwati Area Conservation Program is a joint effort of the Rwandan government with Great Ape Trust and Earthpark, projects funded by Des Moines businessman Ted Townsend. Great Ape Trust is a scientific research center that seeks to understand the origins and future of culture, language, tools and intelligence, and dedicated to conservation of great apes and their habitat. Earthpark is a proposed national center for science-based ecological literacy and immersive learning for students, educators and visitors.

The Gishwati Forest Reserve, now officially the Gishwati National Conservation Park, was once Rwanda’s second-largest forest but was deforested in the 1980s by agricultural development and in the 1990s during the resettlement of people following the civil war and genocide. Human encroachment, deforestation, grazing and the introduction of small-scale farming resulted in extensive soil erosion, flooding, landslides and reduced water quality – all problems that will be addressed in the creation of a 50-kilometer (31-miles) forest corridor that will give the 14 chimpanzees greater range and travel opportunities to nearby Nyungwe National Park. The goal is to create a “Forest of Hope” in an area that had been considered “beyond hope,” according to Great Ape Trust Director of Conservation Dr. Benjamin Beck.

Chancellor, principal investigator for the program’s chimpanzee behavioral ecology study, and her team are collecting 80 fecal samples that will go through DNA analysis at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Another 130 fecal samples were shipped to Emory University, Atlanta, Ga., for parasite analysis.

Analysis of the fecal samples will help the team learn more about the genetics of the population and parasitic threats, as well as their eating habits food availability within their range.

“Investigating parasitic infection risk in the Gishwati chimpanzees is an important step in understanding and potentially reducing human impact on the population,” Chancellor said. “In addition, we are examining the genetic diversity of the chimpanzees in the hope that the results will help us to maintain a sustainable population.”

Chancellor and her field staff also recently completed the fifth round of phenology  – that is, the scientific study of periodic biological phenomena, such as flowering, breeding, and migration, in relation to climatic conditions ­– to increase understanding of the seasonal variation in chimpanzee food availability within the Gishwati National Conservation Park.

In other developments:

• Trained ecoguards monitoring the Gishwati Conservation Park continue to report illegal human activities, including cattle grazing. First-time offenders have been warned and educated about the effects of the activity, while repeat offenders have been fined.
• Rwandan government officials are working with local residents on the harvest of illegally planted exotic trees, including non-indigenous eucalyptus. Eucalyptus is a fast-growing source of wood, but the trees do not contribute to biodiversity, do not store carbon as a 200-year-old indigenous tree would and do not attract beneficial insects to the ecosystem. After the harvest of the trees, Gishwati Area Conservation Program officials will pay workers to reforest the land with indigenous species.

The Gishwati project began in late 2007 when Rwanda President H.E. Paul Kagame and Ted Townsend, Great Ape Trust’s founder, pledged at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting to found a national conservation park in Rwanda to benefit climate, biodiversity and the welfare of the Rwandan people.