“We found that, well, apparently they don’t use the sticks because they are more efficient, but because they prefer them,” Juan Lapuente, head of the Comoé Chimpanzee Conservation Project, told Mongabay. This type of behavior had been observed occasionally in other chimp populations before, but researchers were surprised by how common it was among Comoé chimps.
Then they pull the stick out and suck on the end of the brush. They chew the ends of sticks to make a sort of brush and then dip the brush end of the stick into tree cavities where water has accumulated. The western chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes verus) of Comoé National Park in northern Côte d’Ivoire have a unique way of drinking water during the dry season. But camera-trap footage found a healthy population and has since documented unique behaviors not observed in other chimp populations in West Africa. Like elsewhere in West Africa, the chimps’ habitat remains under pressure from farming and herding.Ĭonservationists feared that chimpanzees in Comoé National Park might have been wiped out during a decade of civil conflict in Côte d’Ivoire.With the help of camera-trap footage, researchers found that the Comoé chimps display unique types of behaviors not found in other chimp populations in West Africa.
Despite a decade of uncontrolled poaching, researchers have found what they describe as a “healthy” population of 200 chimpanzees in Côte d’Ivoire’s Comoé National Park.
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