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February 23, 2007

Senegal Chimps Spear Their Suppers

I thought about calling this the Bushbaby Barbeque, but since the chimpanzees are spearing the little wide-eyed primates, not roasting them, it didn't seem quite right. Yet.

Yes, you heard me right. Another example of tool usage has cropped up in primates, but this time they aren't bashing nuts open with rocks, or sucking termites out of their mounds with hollow reeds. This time, they've taken things a step further, honing their tools to make more efficient hunting weapons.

The chimps are sharpening sticks with their teeth and then jabbing the homemade spears into the dens of bushbabies, which they then eat. I personally didn't know that chimps ate bushbabies in the first place, so that was news to me as well.

Chimpanzees in Senegal have been observed making and using wooden spears to hunt other animals, according to a study in the journal Current Biology. It's the first time primates have been seen using tools to hunt.

The first time, huh? You know, it really bugs me when articles say stuff like "Primates and Humans" or "the first time primates have..." You know why? Because humans are primates. Not only do we share the same order (Primate), we are also in the same suborder (Haplorrhini), infraorder (Simiiformes), parvorder (Catarrhini), superfamily (Hominoidea), family (Hominidae) and subfamily (Homininae) as gorillas and chimpanzees. We can even go down to the tribe (Hominini) if we drop the gorillas and only include the chimps. But no, we have to keep ourselves separate. Superior.

Chimps have been known to use tools before... but this use of spear-like weapons to attack other animals is completely new.

More At: BBC News: Chimps use spears to hunt and BBC News: Chimpanzees 'hunt using spears'

New, to us. This does not necessarily mean that the chimps haven't been doing this for a while without us noticing. Much of our research in the past has been done in artificial surroundings. In zoos with captive animals. Certainly there have not been a lot of long term studies in their natural environment and I think that the technologies enabling people to spend more time in natural habitats may have something to do with a lot of these new findings. This is why people like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey have made such an impact on primatology (the study of all primates except humans) and ethology (animal behavior) in the past. Dian Fossey was known for her scorn of the research students she would get for a couple weeks who would then go back to civilization and often never do field work again.

Wikipedia had some more information, including the fact that only about 1 out of 22 of the bush baby "spear-hunts" were successful. This makes me wonder if this is a more recent change in behavior. If you had a 4.5% chance of catching dinner, would you eventually resort to older, tried and true methods? Or is this statistically an improvement on catch rates and so the behavior will reenforce itself?

Posted by sorsha at February 23, 2007 4:26 PM