nature.net
December 2005–January 2006
Bonobo Watch
By Robert Anderson
I have nothing against scientific surveys scanning the heavens for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. But given the odds, my bet is that the only nonhuman intelligence we’ll ever really know is already here. On a recent visit to the San Diego Zoo, I spent several hours observing bonobo apes and decided that, for my money, they’re the best candidates for that distinction. But if your schedule doesn’t permit extended zoo visits, you can always turn to the Web.
The San Diego Zoo’s site, for instance, offers both video and photographic images of the zoo’s denizens. And at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, you can find archived video clips of a colony of eight resident bonobos (scroll down to the choices listed under “Bonobos”). The colony of apes now living at the Trust were once part of an experimental program at the Language Research Center of Georgia State University, near Atlanta. Kanzi, the colony’s most famous member, is regarded by some people as the first ape to demonstrate real speech comprehension. You can see profiles and mug shots of Kanzi and his mates at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa.
Because of their resemblance to chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), bonobos are often, misleadingly, called pygmy chimps, even though they are a separate species (P. paniscus). Bonobos, however, are more than an intelligent animal species. They and their chimpanzee cousins are our closest genetic relatives, at least on the basis of their DNA.
Some investigators argue that bonobos are a living window into the human evolutionary past. William H. Calvin, a neurobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who studies the evolution of the human brain, maintains an excellent site devoted to P. paniscus.
Bonobos apparently evolved social structures quite unlike those of their chimpanzee cousins. The group dynamics of the two species of ape are compared in a video segment, “Why Sex?” from the PBS series Evolution.
Studying animals in zoos has advantages, but it’s no substitute for fieldwork. Unfortunately, bonobos occur only in the remote central rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), and field studies have been limited. Still, some have yielded remarkable observations. E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a primatologist at the Great Ape Trust, discovered that bonobos have fashioned plants into complex symbols to mark jungle trails.
The major threats to bonobo survival in the wild are rainforest destruction and poaching for the bushmeat trade. Alarmingly, late last year the Environment News Service reported that fieldworkers in some areas of the bonobos’ range were having a hard time locating any bonobos at all. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) provides a succinct profile of the bonobo as an endangered species, including its latest population figures. Warning of the species’ imminent extinction, Richard Carroll, a primatologist and the director of the WWF’s Africa Program, says it all: “If humans allow our closest relatives to go extinct, we have failed as a species.”
Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.,
Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2005