Ecology in Action

Anthropologist Richard Leakey sent Jane Goodall to Gombe (now Gombe Stream National Park) to study chimpanzees in the wild. As an anthropologist, he was keenly interested in human behavior, and believed that chimpanzees would provide a window to understanding it. It took Goodall six months of crawling around in the woods before any chimpanzees would allow her to get close enough to observe them. But her persistence paid off, as she was able to document chimpanzees showing some very human behavior including tool making, cooperative hunting and war making. Partway through her career, she elected to devote the rest of her career to environmental activism and education, and Gombe research was continued by a growing community of researchers including her student, Anne Pusey. Pusey was fascinated by mother–infant relationships, by developmental changes in juveniles as they matured, and by how chimpanzees manage to avoid breeding with close relatives. Other researchers at Gombe studied the relationship between rank and reproductive success, and how disease was influencing survival rates in three different populations in the region. Unfortunately, life table studies indicate that disease and a lack of immigrants into the region are threatening the viability of this iconic group of chimpanzees.