The chimpanzees of Gombe, made famous by primate expert Jane Goodall, are in imminent danger of extinction.
In a stark warning to be published this week, Goodall says loss of habitat, and the threat to the animals of disease and inbreeding, are such severe dangers that the already depleted chimp population of Tanzania’s Gombe National Park could soon be reduced to a few dozen animals. Such a devastating decline would leave them in a condition from which they would have no hope of recovery.
The prospect of losing Gombe’s chimp population has horrified scientists, since research at the site transformed our knowledge of ourselves and our closest evolutionary cousins.
In the forthcoming issue of National Geographic, Goodall writes: ‘The news coming out of Gombe is distressing. Growing human pressures on the park threaten the chimpanzees’ very existence.’
Gombe was once part of a huge swathe of equatorial forest, on the western border of Tanzania. It provided Goodall and her colleagues with perfect conditions for observing chimps when she arrived in 1960. These studies have continued without break and have made her project one of the longest continuous animal research projects.
Before Goodall arrived at Gombe it was assumed chimpanzees were peaceful, simple vegetarians. Thanks to her work this idea was overthrown. ‘Chimpanzees have turned out to be powerful, highly intelligent hunters with complex emotions, beings capable of communication, altruism, political alliances, infanticide, warfare and tool making – the last once thought to distinguish humans from the rest of the animal kingdom,’ she states in the National Geographic.
Her work represents ‘one of the great achievements of twentieth-century scholarship’, Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard palaeontologist, once stated.
He acknowledged that it overturned all previous assumptions about our own species’ ‘unique attributes’ such as tool-making skills.
Now the site of these great breakthroughs is threatened with destruction, for Gombe has been reduced to a scrap of forest just eight miles long and one mile wide. Once surrounded by endless tracts of forest, the area has become hemmed in ‘by farms and denuded hillsides’, said Goodall.
Fewer than 100 chimpanzees struggle for survival there, and that, she said, is a dangerously low number. For a chimpanzee community to be viable, there have to be about 50 members in it. Gombe once sustained several communities. Now there is only one full group, along with two other badly depleted groups.
Besides these problems, inbreeding has become a serious risk, and researchers now fear that an epidemic, fire or drought could reduce chimp numbers below a number from which the park’s population could not recover.
In addition, the hungry farmers who have closed in on Gombe’s borders have begun to launch raids on its animals to supply themselves with bushmeat, the flesh of wild forest creatures.
‘The growing demand for wood, food and charcoal has led to illegal logging and the snaring of wildlife within the park,’ said Goodall.
These problems originate in the waves of refugees from civil wars in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo in recent years, which have turned the wild landscapes of western Tanzania into a vast, sprawling area of farms.
In the middle of this is a tiny fragment of forest, which is home to the chimpanzees of Gombe now clinging to existence.
All forest corridors to other chimp communities have been cut by the spread of farms and the animals and their unique culture have become isolated from the rest of the natural world.
‘When I’m thinking about some forest being logged, and the bushmeat trade, it isn’t just a population that’s going, it’s individuals,’ said Goodall.
As she pointed out, if you destroy individuals of such a species, then you are also eradicating ‘all their wisdom, all their cultures that have been passed down from one generation to the next’.
She added: ‘As they go, so one day may we.’ – Guardian Unlimited Â