Des Moines Register
02-22-07
ISU scientists release breakthrough chimp news
BY PERRY BEEMAN
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
Ames, Ia. -- Iowa State University anthropology professor Jill Pruetz this
week made public an internationally significant scientific discovery:
Chimpanzees roaming the mosaic savannah of western Africa regularly hunt
prey with makeshift spears. And adult females and juveniles are doing most of
the hunting with tools, usually a tree branch they sharpen with their teeth.
Typically, scientists had found adult males do the hunting -- and they usually use
their teeth and limbs, not tools.
Pruetz and colleague Paco Bertolani are the first to document chimps habitually
hunting in this way. In southeastern Senegal in western Africa, they found 10
different chimpanzees in 20 instances of the hunting. Most appeared to be trying
to stab bushbabies, a primate related to lemurs, in hollow tree branches or
trunks.
Their peer-reviewed findings will appear today on the web page of “Current
Biology” and in the March 6 edition of the journal.
These findings from the Fongoli research site in Senegal are a big deal in
science circles. Scientists who have studied chimpanzees for decades suspected
chimps were capable of this behavior, partly because chimps use tools to “fish”
for termites and to open fruit and nuts. Yet no one had been able to document
repeated hunting in this manner.
“These research findings are fascinating,” said Anne Pusey, director of Jane
Goodall Institute’s Center for Primate Studies at the University of Minnesota. “To
my knowledge, this is the first report of “habitual use of a tool by chimpanzees
hunting for other vertebrates, and it’s interesting that females do it as much or
more than males.”