Great apes losing ground

This post now on Google News on BasilandSpice, a syndicated website

Text and photos (except gibbon photo) by Sally Kneidel

  Myself (Sally Kneidel) with a young orang in grad school at OU, while a student of Roger Fouts'

Southeast Asia a center for illegal wildlife trade
I'm going to Indonesia soon, to write about the current plight of orangutans who are losing their habitat. And to learn more about the illegal trade in wildlife, especially endangered primates.

If you regularly read the website of "Traffic: The Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network, you know that southeast Asia is the epicenter of the illegal trade in protected wildlife. The Chatuchak weekend market in Bangkok is said to be the single largest market on the planet where wildlife is traded illegally. That's one place I'm going.

New study finds endangered gibbons threatened by pet trade
I do read Traffic regularly and spotted on their website this morning a link to a recent article from the journal  Endangered Species Research, a study of the trade in seven species of gibbons native to Indonesia. All seven of these gibbon species are listed as Endangered by the IUCN, meaning that all are at very high risk of going extinct in the wild. All are protected by Indonesian law and can't legally be kept as pets.

Gibbons, courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org

The researchers for the ESR article I mentioned above reported on 600 gibbons found in 22 zoos and 9 wildlife rescue centers and reintroduction centers from 2003 to 2008. About 2/3 of these animals had been confiscated by Indonesian authorities from persons keeping or trading them illegally. About 1/3 were animals donated by pet owners who grew tired of the gibbons as they aged and were no longer cute pets. The article reported that prosecution of offenders is rare, and so the trade in gibbons and other endangered primates such as orangutans remains rampant.
 
Traffic published an excellent overview of the ESR gibbon article on Dec 7, 2010, on the Traffic website.

Both gibbons and orangutans (also highly endangered) are Great Apes, the animals most closely related to humans. (Other Great Apes include chimpanzees and gorillas.) What animals could be more deserving of our protection, or more interesting?

The illegal pet trade grows more significant as species dwindle
The main threats to most primates are loss of habitat and hunting, but as their numbers decline, the illegal trade in primates is having an increasing impact on the surviving populations. This trade is driven not only by pet owners, but also by demand from biomedical companies and zoos. I recently wrote a post in which I reported that the country importing the most primates is the United States, largely for medical, pharmaceutical, and other research. Many or most of these are wild-caught primates, because wild-caught are much cheaper than those bred and raised in captivity. And most research is paid for by grants, so researchers shop frugally for their experimental subjects.

But the primate pet trade is thriving in the United States too.  If you doubt it, take out a subscription to Animal Finders' Guide, or attend one of the many exotic animal auctions held across the U.S. every year, such as the infamous "Woods and Waters." Animal Finders' Guide advertises these auctions, but the weekly publication is mostly pages of ads selling wildlife, from lions to camels to primates, including chimpanzees. Selling them to anyone who'll pay. Stunned when I read my first copy, I called a man selling a young chimp from his "backyard compound" in Texas. He assured me I needed no papers, offered to drive the chimp halfway to deliver it to me. I don't remember exactly how much he was asking, but I think it was $25,000.

Many of the animals for sale in the United States arrive the same way drugs do: by boat, by private plane, in the trunks of cars. I went to an animal market in Peru that offered baby tamarins, marmosets, night saki monkeys, sloths, baby spider monkeys for sale to anyone who would buy.

A baby spider monkey for sale illegally in a market along the Amazon, photo by Sally Kneidel

An indifferent policeman plays with a baby sloth for sale illegally, photo by Sally Kneidel

The price of these endangered and threatened wildlife in that market by the Amazon?  The equivalent of $2 each. Many were sold as pets; keeping primates as companion animals is still quite popular in the villages of remote Amazonia. Some families had a baby marmoset for every child in the family, as well as turtles and iguanas that they dragged around on rope leashes.

A teenage girl in an Amazonian village with a pet marmoset, photo by Sally Kneidel

Check out my previous post about the Amazonian wildlife market, and my previous post about the popularity of wildlife and primates as pets in Amazonia - both posts with lots of pics.

What can you do?
Support organizations such as the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS), which manages a 1 million acre reserve that is home to 3500 wild orangutans. BOS is committed to rescuing orangutans displaced by the ongoing destruction of their remaining habitat for palm oil plantations.

Support Orangutan Land Trust, an organization affiliated with BOS. I know the people who manage BOS and OLT, and I know they're making a difference.

Support  SOS, the Sumatran Orangutan Society, an organization working to protect the Sumatran Orangutan.

Support TRAFFIC, an organization committed to informing the public about all species threatened by loss of habitat, hunting, and illegal trade. TRAFFIC has been around for a long time, and is associated with WWF.

I don't know much about Kalaweit, but just looking at their website, they appear to be an organization working to protect and rescue gibbons in Indonesia.

Sources:
Vincent Nijman et al. October 13, 2009. "Saved from trade: donated and confiscated gibbons in zoos and rescue centers in Indonesia." Endangered Species Research (http://www.int-res.com/journals/esr/esr-home/)

See also:
Traffic. "Study highlights gibbon trade in Indonesia" Kuala Lampur, Malaysia.  12/7/2009.

David Adam. "Monkeys, butterflies, turtles... how the pet trade's greed is emptying south-east Asia's forests."
guardian.co.uk The Observer Feb 21, 2010.

Some of my previous posts on these topics:
Monkeys and parrots pouring from the jungle..

U.S. imports 20,000 primates per year

From the Amazon to the Andes, Peru knocked me silly

Keywords: gibbons orangutans red apes Orangutan Outreach endangered animals southeast Asia BOS Borneo great apes

Chimps and Gibbons Have Human Elements to their Language

Gibbon photo courtesy of www.uq.edu.au

Researchers studying a population of wild gibbons in Thailand have found that these great apes recombine sounds to convey different meanings to one another, exhibiting a form of simple syntax.

The researchers, psychologists Esther Clarke and Klaus Zuberbuhler of the University of St. Andrews, claim that the ability to recombine sounds for varied meanings has not previously been demonstrated in apes. Their report was published in December of 2006 in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Before this study, psychologists had held that syntax developed in pre-historic people in response to a growing vocabulary. But this is not the case with gibbons, whose vocal abilities are limited. So perhaps previous theories about the development of syntax in humans will need to be reexamined.

The field studies of gibbon vocalizations, conducted in 2004 and 2005 with 13 groups of white-handed gibbons in Khao Yai National Park, focused on gibbon vocalizations for finding long-term mates and on vocalizations in response to predators. The research team recorded the two different kinds of songs. The songs provoked by predators began with soft "hoo" notes and included another repeated extra note, lasting altogether about 30 seconds. The mating songs were similar to the predator songs but lacked the "hoo" notes and the other extra note, and lasted only about 10 seconds.

Researchers played the recordings to other gibbons.

Gibbons within earshot responded vocally to the recordings, but responded differently to the two types of vocalizations, clearly distinguishing between the predator song and the mating song. Females responded to any song, but waited a full 2 minutes to respond to the predator call. All gibbons within earshot responded to the predator song by loudly repeating it.

This study demonstrates that great apes share some of our own facility for vocal communication.




My Work with Chimps

Although this gibbon research has been heralded as a new discovery of the capacity in apes for complex communication, we have known for decades that apes are capable of complex communication. Their development of language is limited by less versatile anatomy for vocalization than we have. That is, their lips and tongues and soft palates, etc., are unable to produce as many different sounds as we can produce. But researchers, since the 1960s and 1970s, have been teaching American Sign Language to chimps and orangutans and gorillas. These apes can also communicate by way of computer keyboards. As can some parrots.

For 2 years during my graduate training, I worked with Dr. Roger Fouts at the University of Oklahoma in his pioneering work teaching American Sign Language (ASL) to chimps. I was just a graduate student basically working as a research assistant - I was an additional pair of hands to help carry out his research. The object of his research was to see how much American Sign Language chimps could learn, and to see whether they would use it spontaneously with humans and with each other or even teach it to each other.

The chimps I worked with were mostly Bruno and Booee, two youngsters who were about 4 years old. My job was to work with one of them at a time, to get the chimp to go through a binder we had of photos that had been cut out of magazines. Each page had a picture of some object, like food, a ball, water, a bird, a hug, etc. The chimp was supposed to do the hand sign for the object and if he did it correctly, he got a sip of Kool-Aid or some other little tasty treat. Maybe an M&M. Of course, the chimps did not much want to look at the binder of pictures. This act of looking a book did not resemble any normal behavior in their repertoire, and they did not particularly want my approval, so getting them to sit still with the binder was not easy. Imagine a young child with full blown ADD, but 10 times magnified.

In fact, unless the instructor such as myself was very stern with the chimp during the lesson, the language lesson often devolved into the chimp jumping up and running around. On a bad day, the chimp would sometimes run back and forth past me, "accidently" bumping into me as he passed me, to see what I would do. This was a standard sort of bluff that was really a challenge. The chimps did it to everyone on the premises, to test their boundaries. But I was afraid of the little guys, who were by no means full grown, but weren't all that little. More than one of the senior graduate students had missing finger tips from being bitten by chimps during lessons. The chimps had collars and a chain, and I was supposed to grab that and make the chimp sit down. But the collar was within range of their sharp teeth.

The chimps knew I was a wimp and so I seldom made much progress in the language lessons. After a year and a half of trying to work with the chimps, and then with the orangutans in the nearby Oklahoma City Zoo, I decided I wasn't that interested in the language abilities of captive apes. That is, I wasn't very interested in getting them to behave like humans. I was much more interested in the natural behaviors of wildlife. So I transferred to the University of North Carolina to study the field biology of woodland salamanders.

But at any rate, there was merit to Dr. Fouts' studies, and to the continuing studies of one of those senior graduate students, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh who went on to study chimps' acquisition of language for 23 years at Georgia State University. (She's now with the Great Ape Trust of Iowa.) Both Fouts and Savage-Rumbaugh, as well as many other researchers by now, have shown that many apes can learn more than 300 different signs. It may be up to 600 by now, I don't know. Not only that, but when I was in Oklahoma, the chimps that we were working with used the signs to communicate with us and with each other. They regularly asked us for food or drink or to play with the ball, or for a tickle. One of the mother chimps taught some of the signs to her youngster. And - here's the best part - one of the chimps we worked with combined words in a unique way to apply to new objects. It was a new word for "duck." Bruno and Booee and a few other chimps lived on a small island surrounded by a moat to keep them from escaping. There were ducks on the moat on occasion. The chimps did not have a sign for duck, but one of them put together the sign for water and the sign for bird to make "water bird," for the ducks! That convinced me that chimps do have a profound capacity for understanding and using language - they just don't have the vocal apparatus. Gorillas too have been demonstrated to have extensive sign language capacity. Koko was the first gorilla to show this; her researcher was Dr. Francine (Penny) Patterson, who has written at least a couple of great children's books about Koko.

I have to say that I don't particularly approve of coercing chimps or any primates to participate in behavioral studies. And I vehemently object to taking any primates at all for any reason out of the wild. But chimps born in captivity probably have few good options. Learning sign language is preferrable to being subjected to medical research. But far better than either would be a reintroduction program to return them to the wild, or life in a primate sanctuary where they would be protected and have all of their physical, social and mental needs met, and be free to exercise their normal behaviors 24 hours a day.

Chimps are smart. They are much smarter than we think they are, and the language programs have gone a long way to show that. For that reason, the language research has been valuable. But it's only valuable if we pay attention to it. We should protect chimps and all other primates from the wildlife trade, from poaching, and from all other human activities that threaten their safety and their future existence. Their survival hangs in the balance as we continue to destroy their remaining habitat and remove animals from nature. I hope we can stop before we've eliminated our only close relatives on this planet.

KEYWORDS:: CHIMP CHIMPS APES GIBBONS GIBBON PRIMATES PRIMATE RESEARCH AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE VOCALIZATIONS SYNTAX PREDATOR SONG MATING SONG WILDLIFE TRADE POACHING HABITAT PRIMATE SANCTUARY