Sites of the Great Apes

Natural History, March, 1999 by Robert (American businessman and engineer) Anderson

When anthropologists try to imagine the behavior of the earliest hominids, they turn to the great apes for clues. Many of the groups studying wild ape populations can be found on the Internet. To find out where research is being conducted in Africa, go to weber. ucsd.edu/~jmoore/apesites/ApeSite.html. For a list of sites, try www.primate. wisc.edu/pin/behavior, html.

Information on bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, which are often cited as the most human of the apes for their intelligence and sociability, can be found at the Bonobo Protection Fund (www.gsu.edu/ ~wwwbpf/bpf/). Bonobos are confined to a small part of the Congo basin, and like all the great apes, they are endangered. To learn about the habits of chimpanzees, try www.tc.umn.edu/~joha0103/chimp.html. The Predatory Behavior and Ecology of Wild Chimpanzees (www-rcf.usc.edu/ ~stanford/chimphunt.html) gives some insight into the diets of our distant ancestors. The Bwindi-Impenetrable Great Ape Project (www-rcf.usc.edu/~stanford/bigape. html), in Uganda's Bwindi-Impenetrable National Park, is of special interest to primatologists; the park is the only place where chimpanzees and mountain gorillas share the forests.

Gorilla Online (www.selu.com/~bio/gorilla/) provides data on the largest of the apes and an excellent list of sites. One site I tried, Mountain Gorilla Protection (deathstar.rutgers.edu/projects/gorilla /gorilla.html), is great if you want to "fly" over the Virunga Volcanoes in the Congo Republic, Uganda, and Rwanda, where the mountain gorillas live.

Those interested in the red apes of Borneo and Sumatra should visit the Orangutan Foundation International's site (www.ns.net/orangutan/index1.html). The foundation organizes study tours to observe orangutans in the forests of Indonesia's Tanjung Puting National Park. Finally, there is The Great Ape Project (www.enviroweb.org/gap/gaphome.html), an organization dedicated to expanding fundamental human rights and moral protections to include our closest animal relatives.

Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer based in Los Angeles.