Guests find walking the trails in the Mugiri forest, viewing chimpanzees from close range and living in chimp camp surrounded by wildlife for a few days to be extraordinary experience.
We ask guests who share these experiences with us to support the project when they visit, both because there are extra expenses when guests are in camp, but more importantly because we expect all those who share the chimpanzee experience to contribute to chimpanzee research and conservation.
Why Study Dry-Habitat Chimpanzees?
Jane Goodall began her pioneering study of chimpanzees at Gombe in 1960; it is still going strong today. Toshisada Nishida started his research at Mahale in 1965, and despite his recent death, the project shows no sign of slowing. There have been 40 or more chimpanzee research initiatives over the years, and at least a dozen are active today. You may wonder whether the Semliki Chimpanzee Project is worthwhile.
Yes. If for no other reason, research is the most powerful conservation force at Semliki and elsewhere; researchers discourage poaching, deforestation and government neglect. Because scientists cannot understand the behavior and ecology of a species without studying them in habitats unaltered by human interference, they have a powerful motivation to keep their study subjects alive and habitat destruction to a minimum. While in theory local governments, national governments, conservation agencies and conservation officials are tasked with the preservation of natural habitats, they’re paid whether they succeed or not. Researchers lose their project when they lose their study subjects. The presence of researchers in the forest deters both poaching and illegal logging, in part because encroachers know there’s somebody there who care, who will report them, and who will try to stop them. Researchers go into the forest almost daily to gather their data, and therefore they monitor the habitat more closely than officials can. Researchers tend to be vocal advocates to local and national authorities, and they don’t have the mixed motivations some local authorities can have, since their relatives and friends might be the very poachers and illegal loggers who are destroying the forest and its wildlife. If nothing else is accomplished by SCP—and we hope to accomplish much more—it has decreased habitat destruction and chimpanzee deaths at Semliki.
But there are important scientific reasons to study chimpanzees at Semliki Dry-habitat chimpanzees are of enormous relevance to human paleontology and great ape socioecology. Most Pan troglodytes study sites—in fact, all but two others—are in closed canopy or seasonal forests, which means the selection pressures that act on dry-habitat apes, and their response to such challenges, are poorly known. The Toro-Semliki Wildlife Reserve is among the driest chimpanzee study sites, and it is this feature that led the Prof. Hunt and his team to initiate fieldwork there in 1996. Semliki chimpanzees display a number of unusual features related to this unusual habitat: they hunt rarely; they exploit few savanna resources; their community numbers are, counterintuitively, higher than at other sites; and despite the widespread availability of subterranean food items in their habitat, they include none in their diet. While their habitat is open, they appear no less arboreal than other populations.
Preliminary observations and well-established socioecological theory lead us to believe that open habitats impose unusual selection pressures on nearly every aspect of chimpanzee behavior and morphology, affecting foraging, ranging, dental morphology, facial robusticity, canine size, intracommunity and intercommunity aggression, social dominance, patrolling, hunting, kin-selection, locomotion, posture, hormone profiles and genetics. We will focus particularly on issues related to proto- and early hominin evolution, such as the evolution of bipedalism.
The dispersed resources and consequent need for long distance travel at Semliki mean that the social behavior of dry-habitat chimpanzees must adapt in unique ways. One of those ways appears to be a reduction in interpersonal violence (Hunt, 1998; Hunt and McGrew, 2002). Chimpanzees are among the most violent of mammals; humans less so. Perhaps the origin of a less violent, more cooperative society is in the dispersed resources of dry habitats.
Human paleontology can benefit by the study Semliki chimpanzees because their habitat is similar to that of the earliest human ancestors, the australopiths. Chimpanzees presumably respond, anatomically, physiologically and behaviorally, to dry habitats in ways that are similar to those earliest humans.