Marvellous footage captured in January of this year in a farflung corner of Gabon’s Batéké Plateau National Park shows an inquisitive female chimpanzee probing a camera trap with a stick:
Captured by Gabon’s National Agency for National Parks (ANPN), global wild cat conservation organisation Panthera, and Gaboma Multimedia & Production, the video not only shows a great ape that just a few decades ago was thought to be rare or extirpated from the region, but also documents the first chimpanzee tool-use in this part of Gabon.
The female chimp in question belongs to the central subspecies, one of four or five defined for this near cousin of ours. Gabon as well as the Republic of Congo is a stronghold for the central chimp, found across more than 700,000 square kilometres of Central Africa. Relying primarily on ripe fruits but also occasionally hunting mammals such as monkeys and duikers, central chimps have been the subject of productive research in Gabon, where, for example, the apes have been recorded tending to wounds with crushed insects and, in Loango National Park, conducting coordinated attacks on groups of western lowland gorillas and killing infant gorillas.
Tool use—for example, using sticks for pounding honeycombs, extracting honey, and probing logs in search of prey—has been recorded among chimps in Gabon’s Loango and Moukalaba-Doudou national parks. Now, this newly released camera-trap footage shows it’s also a skill practiced on the Batéké Plateau.
The use of a stick to investigate the trail camera is also an intriguing behaviour that wasn’t noted in a 2019 survey of the responses of naive African apes—chimps, bonobos, and gorillas—to camera traps. While the researchers in that study predicted that chimps would display the most curiosity toward camera traps on account of their more diverse diet and habitat preferences, in fact it was the bonobos and gorillas that “demonstrated a stronger looking impulse toward the camera trap device compared to chimpanzees, suggesting higher visual attention and curiosity.”
The study authors speculated that possibly the remote cameras simply didn’t provoke enough excitement or fear in chimps to warrant close interest. Of the three ape species, bonobos showed the most fearful responses to the camera traps—a reflection, perhaps, of the more egalitarian bonobo society, where the “allocation of risk is predicted to be spread more evenly within the group” as compared to chimps and gorillas, where one or a handful of individuals serve as leaders.
Chimps—classified as Endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)—and western lowland gorillas (Critically Endangered) are among a number of primate species recorded in Batéké Plateau National Park, also home to several kinds of monkey—from moustached monkeys and northern talapoins to mandrills, first documented in a 2017 camera-trapping survey—as well as pottos and galagos.
The park lies in southeastern Gabon and encompasses a striking landscape of ecological frontiers. It marks where the northwestern edge of the Batéké Plateau itself—a highland of sandstone and ancient sand dunes that sprawls across some six million hectares of Gabon, Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola—subsides to the great low-lying Gabonese rainforest. The Plateau, which includes domes and escarpments cut by rolling foothills and river valleys, harbours extensive tracts of grassland and savannah, with gallery forests—some of which finger into the highland from the bordering rainforest—threaded through as lusher ribbons of tall trees and dense understory.
A local manifestation of the extensive Western Congolian Forest-Savanna Mosaic, the Batéké’s blend of grassy glades and parkland intermixed with riverine forest makes for a fascinating faunal mashup. Here, historically, lions, spotted hyenas, waterbuck, and other savannah and woodland species shared the greater landscape with rainforest denizens such as forest elephants, forest buffalo, forest duikers, sitatunga, and red river hogs—and, of course, those two great apes (though chimps in places can be savannah-dwellers).
Camera-trap surveys undertaken around when the park was established in 2004 and subsequently have made some major discoveries, not least (thanks to camera traps set up for chimps) the presence of a male lion in 2015 (which we reported on here and here): the first well-documented observation in Gabon since 1996. Genetic analysis of hair samples gathered from this lion suggested it may have been a holdout of the so-called Batéké lions that formerly seemed to specialise in this savannah/woodland country rather than a disperser from West/Central African prides in Cameroon or the Central African Republic, separated from Gabon by dense rainforest.
Indeed, the trailcam investigated by the chimp was part of an effort by ANPN and Panthera to monitor for big cats in the park, and, according to Panthera, happened to be in the same area where the 2015 lion was documented. Panthera and ANPN are collaborating on a lion translocation for Batéké Plateau National Park—the first of its kind in West or Central Africa—which is scheduled to begin this year.
Top header image: David C, Flickr
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