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Chimps use "tool kits," researchers say

A remote rainforest in Central Africa is home to these innovative chimpanzees, who also "fish" for termite dinners, researchers say.

Chimps in this area, known as the Goualougo Triangle, were videotaped using heavy sticks to punch holes in termite mounds, then using a lighter stick called a "fishing tool" to extract termites. 

For underground termite mounds the chimps used a different stick-tool to puncture the nest before scooping up the termites.

The area where the chimps live was recently saved from logging by a collaboration among the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, a timber company and the Republic of Congo.

The research, by Crickette Sanz of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and colleagues, is published in the November issue of the journal The American Naturalist. 

The researchers said that four years ago, a Swiss timber company planned to establish a logging operation where the chimps live, which would have irreparably harmed this unique population that conservationists believe may have had virtually no historic contact with humans.

Subsequent cooperation between the conservation group, the company and the Republic of Congo led to the eventual protection of the forest, now part of Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park.

"Had the Wildlife Conservation Society not helped to save the Goualougo from being logged, this discovery would not have been made and the forest and the chimps would have been lost," said Steve Gulick of Wildland Security. 

But Gulick added that the findings make him wonder what could have been found in the many other areas that have already been logged and destroyed -- or are about to be.

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