Conservationists in DR Congo are celebrating the birth of a baby mountain gorilla in a group of great apes in the Virunga National Park.

The new arrival was discovered on Tuesday by rangers during a routine check of the group, known to researchers as the Munyaga family.

Wildlife groups described the birth as “a key step toward the survival of this critically endangered species”.

Since January, nine gorillas in the region have been killed by gunmen.

The worst attack happened in late July, which resulted in four apes being shot dead inside the national park, located in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Conservationists described the killings as “executions” because the bodies were left at the scene, whereas poachers would have sold the carcasses as either food or trophies.

‘Significant birth’

Norbert Mushenzi, a local director for the Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN), said the birth was very welcome news in what had been a grim period.

“Despite the slaughter of the gorillas in July that shocked the whole world, we can see that they are fighting to survive,” Mr Mushenzi said.

“ICCN is collaborating with all conservation NGOs to intensify the protection of the gorillas with additional guards and reinforced patrols.”

The rangers who made the discovery said the baby gorilla, a male, was born on Tuesday.

His mother, Balali, is the only female in the Munyaga family. The other members are made up of three silverbacks (dominant males) and a blackback.

“Every birth is important, but given the fact that we lost 1% of the world’s population in July alone this latest birth is even more significant,” said Robert Muir from the Frankfurt Zoological Society.

“We are doing everything we can to try and keep the gorillas safe and ensure there is not a repeat of last month’s slaughter.”

‘Crisis management’

The ICCN and conservation groups, including WildlifeDirect, Frankfurt Zoological Society and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), are funding a £50,000 ($100,000) three-month crisis management programme following the recent series of attacks.

The programme aims to increase the number of rangers patrolling the sector and the frequency of these patrols.

A census of the remaining mountain gorilla families is also being carried out.

Dr Richard Leakey, chairman of WildlifeDirect, said the news did not hide the fact that gorilla conservation in the region was still facing a crisis, possibly one of the worst for more than 35 years.

“We must not forget the Rangers who face constant threats from poachers and the illegal charcoal trade in Virunga to protect this endangered species for all of us.”

As well as the July killings, two silverback male gorillas were shot dead earlier this year, while a female was killed in May.

A census carried out in 2004 estimated that 380 mountain gorillas, more than half of the world’s population, lived in the national park and surrounding Virunga volcanoes region.

The Government was today found guilty of turning a blind eye to
substantial suffering of animals in Home Office licensed experiments and
consequently misleading the public over the extent of animal suffering
in UK laboratories.

High Court Judge Mitting ruled that the Home Secretary acted unlawfully
in licensing invasive brain experiments on Marmosets at Cambridge
University as ‘/moderate’ /rather than /‘substantial’ /suffering/. /

His ruling that the Government unlawfully licenses experiments follows a
Judicial Review hearing at the High Court in London this week. It was
brought by the BUAV based on extensive video and documentary evidence it
collected during a ten month undercover investigation of a Cambridge
University neuroscience primate lab during 2000/2001.

The investigation revealed the Home Office assigned a ‘/moderate/’
suffering banding to experiments which included highly invasive
procedures such as removing of the top of marmoset’s heads to induce
strokes. The guidelines state that any procedure which ‘/may lead to a
major departure from the animals’ usual state of health and of
well-being/’ must be categorised as ‘/substantial’/, and therefore
undergo far stricter assessment to get licensed.

The Judgment should mean a greater number of licenses will not be
granted, as correctly categorised ‘/substantial’/ procedures will not
pass the key /cost /(to the animal): /benefit /(to research) test. It is
also likely to mean that the percentage of licences categorised as
‘/substantial’/ will be perhaps considerably higher, and therefore offer
the public a more accurate picture of the extent of animal suffering
that goes on in UK Government licensed experiments.

‘We have proven that the Government misleads the public and Parliament
about the severity of animal experiments licensed in the UK,’ said BUAV
chief executive Michelle Thew.

‘The government can no longer pretend it has the strictest regulation of
animal experiments in the world. This case demonstrates it has ridden
roughshod over the public’s trust in this matter.

‘Now we hope taxpayers – the vast majority of whom are opposed to animal
suffering in laboratories – will be given more accurate information
about the animal experiments they fund.’

The BUAV was awarded a rare costs protection order by Mr Justice Bean
last year to enable it to bring this case in the public interest after
the Home Office projected its defence costs would amount to up to
£150,000.

Adult female shot near Obenge, on the Lomami River. Lack of fishing is a sign that the locals aren’t originally from here. Did they come with the Belgians or the Arab slave traders?

When I asked where he had killed her, Jafari, the hunter, waved in a general sort of way to the northeast, across the Lomami. I did not say much else. He was proud and let me take a picture.

Jafari killed this adult female with his old Belgian gun. Over the last few days I have heard other shots from the village. I have also seen monkey snares in the forest nearby. These, too, could catch bonobo.

There is much more hunting than I recognized at first. Yesterday a pirogue came back with an elephant chopped into hunks. There are war guns, lots of them, left in this country after the long rebellion. An AK47 is just 300 dollars in Kisangani. That is the weapon that was used to kill the elephant.

There are many more animals killed than are needed to feed this small village. Apparently a few women-traders travel across the forest from villages on the Lualaba. They bring salt, sugar, cloth and probably shotgun shells. Then they carry back bushmeat.

How often are Bonobo Killed? I don’t know. How far away do Jafari and his friends hunt? I don’t know.

Strange that they can be so poor here and yet they can empty the forest of what the world considers its greatest riches. And still they stay so poor. The kids in this village don’t go to school – there is none – and, of course, there is no health center at all.

Is it possible to make a difference – for the bonobo and the people? I am sure it is.

Jafari with gun (see below)

by Rick Bogle

Apollo died when he was 7 years old, one year ago today. Like many captive
chimps, he had a tumultuous life. He was born at the infamous and
now-defunct Coulston Foundation, where he was probably taken from his mother
within hours of birth, only to be slapped in with bunches of babies and
raised with limited maternal influence. The babies would line up in a row
and hug each other, front to back, rocking. Around 18 months, Apollo was
used as a bartering chip – he’d be given to a Hollywood chimpanzee trainer
in exchange for a rosy documentary about his not-so-rosy birthplace. It was
the first of many exchanges in which Apollo would play an unwitting role. If
he hadn’t been a part of that exchange, he’d probably have been used for
invasive experiments. So his new trainer was “saving” him from research. But
even in salvation, he couldn’t survive.

I first met Apollo when I was working undercover. At first sight, I knew I’d
fall in love with him. He was the trouble-maker of the group, and those boys
are always my favorites. Sweet and smart, but misunderstood and mistreated.
My kind of guy. I wanted to get to know him better but since he was marked
as the bad boy, I wasn’t always allowed to interact with him. I remember one
special day when I was sitting on the lawn grooming him. He head-bobbed at
me. It’s a fun, happy signal: Play with me! Before I could stop myself I
accepted by head bobbing back. But the trainer grabbed me. “Don’t do that!
It means he’s about to attack!” He had no idea what it meant.

Apollo was so curious and mischievous. He always wanted to look up peoples’
shirts – especially women’s shirts. He wanted to play, he wanted to wrestle.
He was smart. He bit people. Of course he did. He was a juvenile male
chimpanzee. He had all the natural, normal impulses. He tested his limits
constantly. As a result, he received the most brutal beatings I saw when I
was undercover. I saw him punched, kicked, beaten, and more. Big, grown men
tried to assert their dominance over him constantly. Once, when he bit a
trainer, he suffered greatly. Though I didn’t see the beating, I saw his
face afterwards. It was so swollen. He looked at me without his usual
glimmer. We were alone so I said out loud – “Are you okay?” There was a
heartbreaking acceptance in his puffy eyes. That was his life and he knew
it. He was only 4 years old at the time.

Early on, he was used on TV and in movies, in advertisements and at
celebrity parties. But his mischief was hard to control, so his “jobs”
declined over the years. At the end of his short life, he was living in a
cage at a compound out in the desert. I’m told he was alone in that cage. He
should never have been there. His mom shouldn’t have been used as a breeding
machine. He shouldn’t have been born into biomedical research. He shouldn’t
have been tossed off to Hollywood. He shouldn’t have been forced to “smile”
on cue so we could laugh at him. He shouldn’t have experienced what he did.

I was devastated when I learned that he died suddenly, still under his
trainer’s care. I hadn’t helped him. I hadn’t made a difference for him. A
few months later, his compatriots at the compound were rescued and retired
to sanctuaries. He should have gone with them – a small “thank you” after so
many years of suffering. I couldn’t help him.

There are many more Apollos out there. In labs, in training compounds, in
back yards. I tell his story today because we must help them.

On this day, remember Apollo.

The Government will be forced to answer allegations that it ignores its
legal duty to ensure animal suffering is kept to a minimum in UK labs,
in a case to be heard by the High Court this week (Tues 24^th – 26th July)

A High Court Judge will consider extensive evidence that the Government
turns a blind eye to substantial suffering of animals in Home Office
licensed experiments, and therefore misleads the public in its
assurances that regulation of animal research UK is ‘strict’ and that
‘animals don’t suffer.’

The Judicial Review is based on extensive video and documentary evidence
collected by the BUAV during a ten month undercover investigation of a
Cambridge University neuroscience primate lab during 2000/2001.

The investigation revealed that marmoset monkeys were left unattended
for 15 hours or more after undergoing highly invasive brain surgery –
sometimes with either no painkiller or just one dose of calpol to
relieve the pain.

The BUAV is also questioning why the Home Office assigned a ‘moderate’
suffering banding to experiments which included highly invasive
procedures such as removing of the top of marmoset’s heads to induce
strokes. The guidelines state that any procedure which ‘/may lead to a
major departure from the animals’ usual state of health and of
well-being/’ must be categorised as ‘/substantial’/, and undergo far
stricter assessment to get licensed.

The BUAV was awarded a rare costs protection order by Mr Justice Bean
last year to enable it to bring this case in the public interest after
the Home Office projected its defence costs would amount to up to
£150,000 (see notes to editor).

‘These findings entirely undermine the credibility of the Government’s
defence of animal research in the UK – namely that it is strictly
regulated and that animals don’t really suffer,’ said BUAV chief
executive Michelle Thew.

‘This case demonstrates the Government rides roughshod over the public’s
trust in this matter. The Government refuses to be held to account on
this issue – it routinely rejects FOI requests about animal experiments
out of hand.

‘It is the sad fact that the public’s only real access to information
about the reality of animal experiments is via undercover investigations
by a not for profit organisation. Furthermore, it is entirely
unacceptable that a democratic government is not held to account on
activities funded by taxpayers – the vast majority of whom are opposed
to animal suffering in laboratories’ (/see notes to editor)./

Seventy-eight chimpanzees once used for medical testing will now give
researchers insights into how to improve geriatric care for humans.
Since a ban on medical testing on chimpanzees last year, the aging
primates have been living out their days at a luxurious ape “retirement”
center run in Kumamoto Prefecture by a pharmaceutical company.

A new research wing will open at the center on Aug. 1 to study the aging
process in primates.

The project, an initiative of Kyoto University and Nagoya-based Sanwa
Kagaku Kenkyusho Co. pharmaceutical company, will be funded by drug
companies.

Chimps were first brought to Japan by drug companies in the 1970s for
research on infectious diseases caused by viruses and bacteria and for
new drug trials.

Chimps are now classified as endangered. Under the Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, also
known as the Washington Convention, Japan banned the import and export
of the primates since 1980.

With mounting pressure from animal rights activists to stop experiments
on living animals, experiments on chimps were halted in Japan last year.

But park rangers received some good news yesterday when the five-month-old baby of one of the dead females was found alive.

The baby gorilla, named Ndeze, was badly dehydrated but otherwise fine, the rangers reported.

She was taken to the nearby city of Goma, where the young ape will be looked after at the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project.

Ndeze received widespread international attention in February when its mother, called Safari, gave birth—a rare occurrence among the troubled mountain gorillas.

Safari was among the three females found dead, but the baby’s older brother rescued her from the mother’s body after the attack, rangers say.

The siblings had been seen fleetingly in the dense forest, but rangers had expected that the baby would die from dehydration because the brother could not feed her.

When they found the pair, rangers say, Ndeze’s brother was reportedly calm as they took her away.

Paulin Ngobobo, the head ranger of the southern sector of Virunga National Park, called the baby’s rescue “an amazing piece of news.”

“We had given up hope on Ndeze,” he said.

Silverback Shot

The four adult gorillas were shot to death by unknown assailants on Sunday night.

The slaughter deeply shocked the rangers and conservationists who work to protect the endangered gorillas in a park that has been ravaged by civil strife for years.

“This is a disaster,” said Emmanuel de Merode, director of WildlifeDirect, a conservation group based in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya that supports the rangers working in Virunga.

Park staff and WildlifeDirect officials stationed in Virunga’s Bukima camp said they heard gunshots coming from inside the dense forest around 8 p.m. on Sunday.

When the rangers ventured into the forest on Monday morning, they found the three female gorillas.

“The gorillas were all quite close together. They had all been shot,” de Merode said.

In addition to Safari, another dead female was the mother of a two-year-old. The third gorilla killed was pregnant.

It was not until the following day that rangers found the silverback Senkekwe, the leader of the so-called Rugendo family of 12 individuals.

Another two gorillas from the family are reportedly missing, their fate unknown.

Rebel Militias

The Rugendo family is one of several groups of gorillas that live on the Congo side of the sprawling Virunga National Park, which straddles the border of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda, and are visited from the Bukima camp, Kazinform quotes National Geographic News.

More than half of the gorillas’ population, estimated at about 700, is found in Virunga. The rest live in forests in Rwanda and Uganda.

The park lies in the heart of one of the most troubled regions of Africa.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is struggling to emerge from a civil war that has left an estimated four million people dead and dates back to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

Today the area is home to a vast array of rebel militias, government soldiers, foreign troops, and villagers who are unsympathetic to the rangers protecting the park. Poaching remains a major problem.

Early this year two silverback gorillas were killed within the span of two days in the same area as where the latest killings occurred. The incident sparked an international outcry of support for the embattled gorillas.

Those apes appeared to have been butchered for their meat. One of them had had his dismembered body dumped in a latrine.

Act of Sabotage

Last month a female gorilla from the Kabirizi family was found shot to death in the park.

Another female from that family has been missing ever since and is presumed to have been killed too.

Sunday’s “execution-style” killing of the gorillas was identical to the killing last month, de Merode said.

He believes the slaughter was meant to send a chilling message to the rangers to get out of the park.

“We don’t think it was the villagers who did it,” he said. “This was deliberate … an act of sabotage.”

De Merode said there is evidence from the site of the killings linking the incident to the area’s lucrative charcoal trade.

Apparently the killers had tried to burn one of the bodies.

Virtually all the charcoal supplied to nearby Goma—worth an estimated U.S. $30 million a year—is made from wood harvested illegally inside Virunga National Park, he said.

“Last year Rwanda put a ban on any charcoal production within Rwanda,” de Merode said.

“This means that whole country’s charcoal is largely supplied from Congo,” he added. “This has put a lot of pressure on the park.”

Science Daily — Experimental evidence reveals that chimpanzees will help other unrelated humans and conspecifics without a reward, showing that they share crucial

Debates about altruism are often based on the assumption that it is either unique to humans or else the human version differs from that of other animals in important ways. Thus, only humans are supposed to act on behalf of others, even toward genetically unrelated individuals, without personal gain, at a cost to themselves.

Studies investigating such behaviors in nonhuman primates, especially our close relative the chimpanzee, form an important contribution to this debate.

Felix Warneken and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology present experimental evidence that chimpanzees act altruistically toward genetically unrelated conspecifics.

In addition, in two comparative experiments, they found that both chimpanzees and human infants helped altruistically regardless of any expectation of reward, even when some effort was required, and even when the recipient was an unfamiliar individual–all features previously thought to be unique to humans.

The evolutionary roots of human altruism may thus go deeper than previously thought, reaching as far back as the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. In a related article, Frans de Waal discusses the issues brought out by this discovery.

Citation: Warneken F, Hare B, Melis AP, Hanus D, Tomasello M (2007) Spontaneous altruism by chimpanzees and young children. PLoS Biol 5(7): e184. doi:10.1371/journal. pbio.0050184.

Troops often are distinct from one another because of learned behavior

By Charles Q. Choi

June 8, 2007

Chimpanzees readily learn and share techniques on how to fiddle with gadgets, new research shows, the best evidence yet that our closest living relatives pass on customs and culture just as humans do.

The new findings help shed light on the capabilities of last common ancestor of humans and chimps. And the research could also help develop better robots and artificial intelligences, the researchers say

In the wild, chimpanzee troops often are distinct from one another, possessing collections of up to 20 traditions or customary behaviors that altogether seem to form unique cultures. Such practices include various forms of tool use, including hammers and pestles; courtship rituals such as leaf-clipping, where leaves are clipped noisily with the teeth; social behaviors such as overhead hand-clasping during mutual grooming; and methods for eradicating parasites by either stabbing or squashing them.

While observing chimpanzees, evolutionary psychologist Antoine Spiteri at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland wanted to help settle the question of whether or not the apes learned such practices by watching others like humans do, as opposed to simply knowing how to perform such behaviors innately.

Spiteri and his colleagues investigated six groups of chimpanzees, each with eight to 11 apes, living in captivity in Bastrop, Texas. The researchers taught a lone chimpanzee from one group one technique for obtaining food from a complex gadget, such as stabbing food with a tool. They next taught one chimp from another group a different technique for extracting food from the same gadget, such as pushing it out down a ramp.

The extremely hot Texas weather made it hard for researchers to work, “and because participation by the chimpanzees in each of these studies has been completely voluntary, it sometimes means that we as experimenters have had to be extremely patient,” Spiteri recalled. “Considering the insights we have gathered, it has been worth the sacrifice.”

Over time, the researchers found each technique for tool use and food extraction spread within each group. In essence, these groups displayed their own unique culture and local traditions.

A number of these chimpanzee groups are next-door neighbors within eyeshot of each other, and researchers found traditions proved catching, with foraging practices spreading from one group to another, findings detailed in the June 19 issue of the journal Current Biology.

“The possibility that some primates may be able to learn from others has great implications on how we treat them and how we think about ourselves,” Spiteri told LiveScience. “These results indicate to us that chimps have a capacity for cultural complexity, which was likely shared by our common ancestor going back around 5 million years ago.”

This work is “particularly useful to robotic development and artificial intelligence,” Spiteri added. “Understanding how the mechanisms of imitation and social learning can help us develop artificial beings that can behave and evolve in the way that we do and ultimately it may help us create other brains.”

KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo – National Park rangers here are battling to save a 2-month-old gorilla found clinging to its dead mother, who was shot dead through the back of the head.

“She’s more or less OK. It is certainly a worrying situation, but not hopeless,” Paulin Ngobobo, senior warden in eastern Congo’s Virunga National Park, said from the city of Goma, where he is looking after the female infant.

He said the young mountain gorilla, born on April 15 and named Ndakasi by conservationists, had accepted baby formula from a feeding bottle. Mountain gorillas usually suckle for up to three years in the wild.

Only 700 mountain gorillas survive in the wild, more than half of them in Virunga.

At least two have been killed and eaten already this year by rebels living off the land as militia fighting drags on despite the official end of Congo’s five-year war in 2003, in which violence, hunger and disease killed around 4 million people.

It was unclear who had killed the adult female or why. She had been killed “execution-style” in the back of the head and left at the scene rather than taken away to be eaten, said Emmanuel de Merode of conservation group Wildlife Direct.

“It looks like she was lured with bananas because we found bananas at the site,” de Merode said from Goma.

“She was shot at very close range … a second gorilla was probably shot because there was a trail of blood nearby and three gunshots were heard. The other was probably wounded and got away,” he said.

“There are militia groups there. This particular incident was in the Mikeno sector, which is on the border of Rwanda. There was a lot of fighting in that area in January and those problems have not entirely been solved,” he said.

Last month Mai Mai rebels attacked patrol posts in Virunga park, killing one wildlife officer and critically injuring three others, and threatened to slaughter gorillas if park rangers retaliated, Wildlife Direct said at the time.

More than 150 rangers have been killed in the last decade while protecting Congo’s parks from poachers, rebel groups, illegal miners and land invasions, working through the war without pay, Wildlife Direct said.