![]() We're looking into getting a motorcycle." "It can take 30 minutes to two hours to walk back to camp after they go to sleep around 6 or 7 p.m., and we have to be back when they wake up around 6 a.m., so it can be exhausting. "Nowadays, we basically stay with them all day until they go to sleep, and we come back before they wake up, to never let them out of our sight," Pruetz said. Unlike chimpanzees that dwell in tropical forests, whose home ranges are usually just roughly four square miles large, savannah-dwelling chimpanzee home ranges are 25 square miles in size or more. "The greatest difficulty initially was finding them," Pruetz recalled. It took four years for the chimpanzees to become comfortable enough with the scientists to allow them to follow the chimps around and observe behaviors such as hunting. Females and juveniles may especially be drawn to hunting "perhaps to exploit niches that adult males haven't, using innovation and creativity to get around competition," Pruetz said. This may have spurred efforts to catch meat by other means. The red colobus monkeys that are the chimp's favored prey are absent in the relatively dry savannahs where the chimps live, as is much prey, Pruetz said. "Still, this involves significantly less energy than in chasing down monkeys, so it is not surprising that it evolved," Pruetz said. There was just one successful attempt in 22 recorded instances of the chimpanzee hunts with their spears. The chimps routinely broke off branches, trimmed them of twigs, leaves and bark and sharpened the tips of their spears with their teeth. However, Pruetz and her colleague, Cambridge biological anthropologist Paco Bertolani, saw something far more complex. ![]() Previously, researchers had spotted one chimpanzee using tools to flush out mammalian prey, specifically employing a branch to rouse a squirrel. After their attacks, the chimps sniffed or licked their weapons, as if to see whether or not they shed blood. ![]() The researchers saw 10 different chimps fashioning spear-like tools to forcibly jab at nocturnal primates known as lesser bushbabies ( Galago senegalensis), which sleep inside hollow branches or tree trunks during the day. The scientists investigated the Fongoli community of savannah-dwelling chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes verus) in southeastern Senegal.
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