Status
Habitat
Range
Group
Neighbouring communities use different tools for the same job.
Termite fishing in the Congo, nut-cracking with stone hammers in Guinea, moss-sponging in Uganda: the techniques do not map onto habitat or food availability. They map onto community, and they are learned from watching. A young chimpanzee acquires the local toolkit the way a child acquires an accent.
That variation is the reason a lost population is not replaceable by a neighbouring one. Numbers have fallen across nearly the whole range, driven by habitat conversion, hunting for meat, and disease — Ebola outbreaks have killed chimpanzees in the tens of thousands in some forest blocks, with no vaccine deployed at scale.
The open shelf
More frames of the chimpanzee
Streamed live from the Commons Quality Images archive, eighteen at a time. Tap any frame to study it — each remains its photographer’s.
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