UN peacekeepers stage great ape escape in Congo

UN peacekeepers stage great ape escape in Congo - New Scientist

Call it the great ape escape. UN peacekeepers have flown four young gorillas from a conflict zone where they were at risk of being poached.

The gorillas were taken to a rehabilitation centre 200 kilometres north of Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and will eventually be released into a nature reserve. "They are settling in very well, eating forest food and making nests," reports Katie Fawcett of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. The UN will fly in six more rescued gorillas from Rwanda in June.

They are eastern lowland gorillas, which number fewer than 5000 in the wild. In 2002, biologists warned that only 10 per cent might survive by 2030, and in March UNEP, the UN Environment Programme, said that most eastern lowland gorillas could be gone by 2020.

The problem, it says, is the region's long-running armed conflict: soldiers and refugees kill wildlife and destroy forests for money and food. And it is getting worse. "Poaching has really shot up, by militias and also the army," says Samantha Newport of Virunga National Park, which rescued the young lowland gorillas, and also shelters a third of the world's 720 remaining mountain gorillas. "It is really a very, very bad time."

Last week, soldiers attacked park staff five times, killing a ranger. UNEP wants UN peacekeepers to police border crossings, and stop the exports of charcoal, timber and minerals that finance the conflict.

Chimps understand wildfire

The same chimps recently found to hunt with spears have also shown a nearly human understanding of wildfire.

Jill Pruetz, the Iowa State University primatologist whose nine-year observation of a group of savanna chimpanzees in the African nation of Senegal already led to one groundbreaking discovery earlier this decade: The chimps sharpen tree branches with their teeth and use them to stab small prey.

Now Pruetz is out with a new paper - co-authored with Associate Professor Thomas LaDuke of East Stroudsburg (Pa.) University - that will give evolutionary scientists new information to apply when considering how humans first understood fire.

Their conclusion: Chimpanzees can predict the movement of wildfire well enough to calmly avoid it without fear and without fleeing.

"Our argument is that if chimpanzees with a pretty small brain are intelligent enough to understand how fire behaves, then we should maybe rethink some of the early evidence of bipeds controlling fire," Pruetz said in an interview.

Her conclusions, published online this week by the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, are on the mark, University of Iowa paleoanthropologist Russell Ciochon believes.

Chimpanzees are the most closely related primate to humans, having split with them evolutionarily some 6 million years ago, he said. There is every reason to think that humans' early ancestors would have conceptualized fire similarly, Ciochon said. He agreed with Pruetz that conceptualizing fire is one evolutionary step away from controlling it and two steps away from starting it.

"This is a very interesting and very provocative article," he said.

The paper is based on Pruetz's observations from spring 2006, toward the end of Senegal's dry season, when twice in as many months she was with the chimps as they escaped a wildfire. Such fires are often set by people to clear fields for planting.

The fire's deafening roar could be heard 100 meters away, she said. The chimps did not flee, as one might expect, however. If they had, it would have required long travel in the open sun in 110-degree temperatures with scarce water supply.

Instead, she said the chimps reacted calmly. They monitored the fire, moved to keep out of its way, and in doing so, minimized the amount of energy they expended to stay safe.

As for herself, her gut told her to get out of there - but her brain told her she was better off staying with the chimps.

"I personally didn't like the idea," she said. "But I felt like I had to stick with the chimps to be safe, because I wasn't as good as they were at predicting how the fire would move."

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Woman Contracts Gorilla HIV: Proof of Direct Connection between SIV and HIV /AIDS

A new strain of HIV has jumped from gorillas to humans.

So far, only one person, a 62-year-old French woman from Cameroon, has been reported to be infected with the virus.

It very closely resembles strains of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) recently discovered in western gorillas in the wild.

"It would be surprising if there aren't many more" human cases, says David Robertson, a bioinformaticist at the University of Manchester, UK who analysed the virus's DNA along with colleagues in France.

"We don't think this is a direct gorilla-to-human transmission." It is more likely to be the result of eating 'Bush meat', plus transmission via sexual activity.

Drug hope

Until 2004, the infected woman lived in a suburb of Cameroon's capital city Yaoundé, where she didn't come into contact with apes or eat their meat, SIV's primary route to humans. This means that she probably acquired the infection from another human, likely through sexual contact.

AIDS

The woman hasn't yet shown any sign of a compromised immune system, the hallmark of AIDS but tests on laboratory-cultured human cells suggest that the virus can replicate in the same white blood cells as other strains of HIV. However, the new virus should be susceptible to anti-retroviral drugs that slow the growth of other strains of HIV, Robertson says.

SIV

Based on its genetic sequence, the virus appears most closely related to a number of SIV strains collected recently in gorilla faecal samples from forests in Cameroon. These viruses also resemble "group O" strains of HIV, which infect far fewer people than other strains of HIV, most of them in Cameroon.

Original source

The discovery of a gorilla virus in humans could suggest that some of these group O viruses came from gorillas, Robertson says, but it's also possible that the virus originated chimpanzees and was transmitted independently to gorillas and to humans.

"Until we do more sampling we're also guessing a little bit," Robertson concedes.

Gorillas on the verge of Extinction!

YOU might have missed it, but in December 2008 - when the world's media were preoccupied with President Barack Obama's election and the global economic recession - the United Nations declared 2009 the Year of the Gorilla.

If you did notice, you could be forgiven for wondering why. Just weeks earlier it was reported that almost half of all primate species are at risk of extinction, so why lavish yet more attention on the one that is seldom out of the spotlight?

Gorilla Numbers Plummeting

The simple answer is because they need it now more than ever. Despite all the film footage, fieldwork and fund-raising, and the efforts of park rangers and conservation NGOs, the number of gorillas continues to plummet. Hunting, logging, mining and disease are taking a terrible toll on the greatest of the great apes, and if things continue as they are, they may be reduced to nothing more than a series of small, highly vulnerable populations within decades.

Iconic Animals

That's not the only reason the UN chose to focus on gorillas. These apes are such iconic animals they can galvanise people into action like few others. Redoubling efforts to protect gorillas and their habitats will benefit other endangered primates, including chimps and bonobos. If those efforts centre on development projects and gorilla tourism, they can also improve the lives of some of the world's poorest people.

Long Term Plan for a Short Term Crisis?

That is the UN's plan. And entirely the wrong one, as far as many gorilla experts are concerned. For all its good intentions, they say, there's no way it can work fast enough to give gorillas any chance of recovery.

For all its good intentions, there is no way the UN's strategy can work fast enough to give gorillas any chance of recovery

"If you try to make saving gorillas a development issue, then you will fail," says Peter Walsh, a leading authority on the abundance and distribution of gorillas. "Any action must focus on protecting the gorillas." Nor is tourism the panacea African governments and potential donors think. "The idea that tourism alone can pay for conservation is a pipe dream," Walsh says. With gorilla numbers falling so fast, it is time to take tough decisions, he argues.

All 4 Species Endangered

The challenge is daunting. Each of the four subspecies of gorilla is listed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List - three of them critically - and each faces its own unique combination of threats and challenges (see map).