Frequently Asked Questions

Bonobos

What are bonobos?

Bonobos are one of the five great apes of the world – the others are chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and humans. Bonobos were not identified as a distinct species (Pan paniscus) from chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) until 1933. There are found only in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). Because of their slender and slightly smaller build, they have also been referred to as gracile or pygmy chimpanzees, but these terms are less commonly used today. The name bonobo is probably derived from a misspelling of a village in the Congo called Bolobo.

How many live at Great Ape Trust?

There are six bonobos living at Great Ape Trust, including the world-famous Kanzi, whose spontaneous lexigrams utterances as an infant opened new frontiers in the study of ape language. Kanzi’s Great Ape Trust family includes two other language-competent bonobos, his half-sister Panbanisha and her son Nyota, as well as the matriarch Matata and two of her children, Elikya and Maisha.

What sort of care do your bonobos receive?

At Great Ape Trust, the bonobos’ diet consists primarily of fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds but they also consume plant piths, nuts, seeds and invertebrates. Bonobos are extremely social individuals, so caretakers go to great lengths to facilitate social groupings of the apes’ liking. The bonobos live in a spacious climate-controlled building with a variety of choices of where to spend time, including towers that a common area known as the “greenhouse,” where they have a view of the outside world. In warm weather months, their lives are greatly enriched by the ability to travel in an outdoor play yard, a favorite retreat where they can climb trees, investigate the shoreline of Great Ape Trust’s 30-acre lake, make fire, knap stones into tools and search for hidden items such as food.

Veterinary care is provided by Iowa State University’s Veterinary School of Medicine, consistently ranked as one of the premier veterinary schools in the United States.

What is the Pan-Homo environment unique to Great Ape Trust?

In Great Ape Trust’s hallmark Pan/Homo environment, infant bonobos are reared with both bonobo (Pan paniscus) and human (Homo sapiens) influences. This environment reinforces the importance of rearing culture in the Great Ape Trust bonobos’ cognitive development. For example, Kanzi, Panbanisha and Nyota’s comprehend spoken English for the same reason that children do: because they were exposed to it in infancy.

Orangutans

What are orangutans?

Orangutans (Pongo spp.) are the only red great ape and are found in the wild only on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. In the Malay language, the word “orang” means “person,” and the word “hutan” means “of the forest. When combined, the create orangutan, or “person of the forest.” The most arboreal of the great apes, wild orangutans spend most of their time in trees. Orangutans have complex mental lives and are behaviorally sophisticated, and among all the great apes except humans, are regarded as the most adept tool users. A variety of forms of tool use have been recorded, such as using leaves as napkins or gloves, using items to extract insects from trees or seeds from spiny fruits, and making “kiss-squeak” noises with leaves or their hands. Scientists have documented that geographically separate orangutan populations show evidence of cultural variation in their behavior.

How many live at Great Ape Trust?

Six orangutans live at Great Ape Trust, including Azy, the first orangutan in the United States to be involved in language research involving symbols on a touchscreen keyboard, and three orangutans retired from the entertainment industry. Other members of the orangutan population are Knobi, Allie, Rocky, Katy and Popi. Rocky, Katy and Popi moved to Great Ape Trust with their retirement from the entertainment industry. Prior to his retirement, Rocky appeared in numerous television commercials and was the most visible orangutan in entertainment. Popi’s entertainment credits include a role alongside Clint Eastwood in “Any Which Way You Can” in the 1980s and as part of a Las Vegas floor show.

What sort of care do they receive?

Orangutan diets consist mainly of fresh fruit and vegetables. During warm-weather months, they also eat “browse,” or freshly cut leaves and branches. Caretakers provide a variety of enrichment opportunities for the orangutan residents, including the opportunity to travel throughout a nearly 4-acre outdoor forest yard when weather permits.

The orangutans’ home was designed their arboreal needs in mind, focusing on vertical space and equipped with fire hoses to simulate vines in the wild, sway poles, shelves and ladders.

Veterinary care is provided by Iowa State University’s Veterinary School of Medicine, consistently ranked as one of the premier veterinary schools in the United States.

Why are the orangutans leaving Great Ape Trust?

The orangutans are leaving Great Ape Trust for the Indianapolis Zoo where they will be reunited with Dr. Robert Shumaker. The transfer was necessary because our increasing orangutan population outgrew the facilities. Additionally, we could not have anticipated how significantly the Floods of 2008 would change the direction of this organization. Though the ape homes were built one foot above the levels set in the record Floods of 1993, floodwaters on our campus in 2008 rose significantly higher than the levels 15 years earlier. As the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Iowa Department of Transportation and other appropriate entities sort out the effects of infrastructure improvements and other construction in the Des Moines River corridor between the 1993 and 2008 flood events, it has become impossible for us to build on our current campus.

Science

What sort of research is conducted as Great Ape Trust?

The science of Great Ape Trust seeking to understand the origins and future of culture, language, tools and intelligence follows the 40-year research corpus of Dr. Duane Rumbaugh, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and William M. Fields.

Why is this research important?

Bonobos are human beings’ closest living relative, more closely related to us than they are to gorillas. Because humans and great apes are so closely related, understanding how great apes think, how they conceptualize and how they rationalize can help us learn more about the human brain and mind. Future research promises to continue to blur the boundary between the basic principles of human and animal learning, language, symbolic function, and complex behaviors.

What is the history of ape language research?

Ape language research can be traced back as far as the 1700s when French philosopher Julien Offray de la Mettrie argued there was no sharp difference between animals and humans and that it was not impossible for an orangutan to speak. In modern times, the research began in earnest in the 1930s when W.N. and L.A. Kellogg co-reared their son with the chimpanzee Gua, who behaved as a human child would except when the structure of her body and brain prevented it. The experiment demonstrated that environment, particularly the psychological environment, is necessary for the development of an individual’s inherent abilities.

In the late 1950s, behavioral psychologists Keith and Cathy Hayes reared an infant chimpanzee, Viki, with hopes that she would learn to speak. Like Gua, she began to understand some spoken language, and was able to assist in dressing herself and sort objects and photos into categories, but the question of whether a chimpanzee with language would also become cultured remained answered.

In the mid-1960s, when Beatrix and Allen Gardner began working with a chimpanzee named Washoe. The Gardners did not attempt to teach her to speak, instead focusing on American Sign Language. Washoe’s success signaled to the established academic world that a languaged ape had finally arrived.

Major breakthroughs occurred from 1971-1976 when Lana, a female chimpanzee trained by Dr. Duane Rumbaugh began forming multi-word sentences on a computer-based lexigram keyboard on which abstract symbols represented words. The innovation is credited with moving the study of ape language beyond the question of whether apes can understand spoken English and communicate with humans to more complex inquires about what lexigram utterances mean within a socio-culture framework.

Arguing that the essence of language does not exist outside sociality, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh used the LANA keyboard with chimpanzees Sherman and Austin from 1975-1980. Unlike Lana, Sherman and Austin could categorize, pretend, plan, comprehend and respond to one another. In addition to their more complex use of language, an increase in sociality and cooperation was noted.

In 1980, Savage-Rumbaugh began working with the wild-born bonobo Matata using the lexigram keyboard. Matata’s 9-month-old adopted son Kanzi was in the lab during the largely unsuccessful trials with Matata, and although no effort were made to include him in the research, he spontaneously demonstrated productive competence for lexigrams and receptive competence for English when his own instruction began. This led to the breakthrough finding that some apes acquire language in the same way as humans do: by being exposed to it in infancy.

Today, Great Ape Trust is the only place in the world involved in ape language research consistent with the 40-year corpus of Dr. Duane Rumbaugh, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and William M. Fields.

Do you conduct biomedical research at Great Ape Trust?

Never. The scientific research is non-invasive and always voluntary for our great ape collaborators.

With which academic institutions are you associated?

Great Ape Trust has academic affiliations with Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa; Simpson College, Indianola, Iowa; Buena Vista University, Storm Lake, Iowa; and Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.

How is the research at Great Ape Trust funded?

Founder Ted Townsend will provide operational funding in 2010. In the future, funding will be derived from grants, academic partnerships and scientific collaboration.

Forest of Hope

What is the Forest of Hope?

The Forest of Hope, officially known as the Gishwati Area Conservation Program, is a chimpanzee conservation and forest restoration project we direct in Rwanda.

GACP began in late 2007 when H.E. President Paul Kagame and Great Ape Trust and Earthpark Founder Ted Townsend pledged at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting to found a “national conservation park” in Rwanda to benefit climate, biodiversity and the welfare of the Rwandan people..

The Gishwati Forest Reserve’s history of deforestation extends over 50 years, in part because of ill-advised large-scale cattle ranching projects, resettlement of refugees after the genocide, inefficient small-plot farming and the establishment of plantations of non-native trees.  As a result, the area has been plagued with catastrophic flooding, landslides, erosion, decreased soil fertility, decreased water quality and heavy river siltation – all of which aggravate a cycle of abject poverty. 

What makes this conservation effort unique?

There are several components to the Gishwati Area Conservation Program:  The restoration of forests and biodiversity, the conservation of a small population of endangered chimpanzees and the improved livelihood of those people living in the region. Poverty is a threat to conservation, so we must simultaneously protect and study the Gishwati chimpanzees, expand their forest habitat, and foster the economic development of the local human population

Great Ape Trust, along with our Rwandan partners, is the only international conservation organization focusing on Gishwati.  We are developing innovative and ambitious solutions that will make this a model.

A unique element of this effort is the proposed 30 mile (50 km) forest corridor that will extend the Gishwati Forest to Mukuru Forest and eventually to Nyungwe National Park.  This ‘life bridge’ will allow the 15 Gishwati chimpanzees to live, socialize and breed with the hundreds of chimpanzees in Nyungwe.

Isn’t that a great deal of effort for a very small population of chimpanzees?

Yes, we are investing a lot of time and money in studying and saving 15 chimpanzees and 3,000 acres of forest. But how much would be too much? Chimpanzees are the animals most similar to humans and we know that they have very human-like emotions and thinking. The thought of even one of these majestic and wonderful apes starving to death or being killed is simply not acceptable to us at Great Ape Trust. Every ape life has value!

Certainly, the loss of the Gishwati forest and its chimpanzees would not cause the immediate extinction of chimpanzees as a species. But the number of wild chimpanzees in Africa has decreased by 90% since 1900. These 15 are the remnants of hundreds that occupied Gishwati only 40 years ago. Only a century or two ago Gishwati was a part of a vast north-south forest that was home to thousands of chimpanzees, gorillas, elephants and other wonderful animals and plants. We feel obligated to draw the line and insist on no further loss, no matter how small. 

In fact, we feel obligated to reverse the trend and recover biodiversity that we have already lost. Gishwati is a stepping stone, critically positioned for reconnecting and restoring this vast and unique forest. Since we began our work, the chimpanzee population has increased by 15% and the forest by 67%, even as we have energized economic and social benefits for local people.

We are blending the best established scientific and conservation strategies with new innovative approaches to succeed in the “do-or-die” environment of Gishwati. We are a model for conservation within the model of economic and political rebirth that is Rwanda, and we are unique among ape conservation projects in enjoying the personal support of a nation’s president, in this case H.E. President Paul Kagame.

We think Gishwati is the place to draw the line, and we think that dispassionate doubts based on “priorities” and “cost-benefits analyses” are not enough to defeat the forces that would rob our children of wild apes and the benefits and wonders of the natural world. If we can save Gishwati, we can save apes everywhere!

Are there eco-tourism opportunities in Gishwati?

We believe there will be eco-tourism opportunities available in the near future. Our Rwandan and American team members continue to discuss ideas with other conservation and eco-tourism entities throughout Rwanda.

The Forest of Hope chimpanzees are not habituated to humans so visitors to Gishwati may or may not see apes.  However, there are other primates in the forest as well as many birds unique to that portion of Rwanda.

Because of the size of the Gishwati Forest (3,000-plus acres) and the small, but growing population of chimpanzees (15) we must be mindful of the forest’s fragile eco-system.   To succeed, eco-tourism must be beneficial for the plants, animals and people in and around Gishwati.

Why should Iowans or Americans care about this project in Rwanda?

This can best be answered in a quote from Great Ape Trust Conservation Director Dr. Benjamin Beck as it appeared in The Des Moines Register.

“Environmental degradation deepens all of the adversity of poverty: social injustice, gender inequality, lack of education, malnutrition and ill health, overpopulation, lack of economic development and childhood neglect.  Any and all of these factors contribute to political instability at a national and regional level, which in turn can ignite threats to world peace and global stability.  That is a major reason why Gishwati matters in Iowa, and why Iowans have a stake in stabilizing and restoring environments and biodiversity throughout the world.”

How may I get involved?

The Gishwati Area Conservation Program is looking for individuals with a wide range of expertise to help restore this degraded rain forest, save a small colony of endangered chimpanzees and deliver economic sustainability to one of the world’s poorest regions.

Areas of expertise and assistance the Gishwati Area Conservation Park seeks:

• Expert advice for agricultural cooperatives regarding higher value crops, e.g. apples, nuts.
• Expert advice and assistance in providing wind or solar electrification for 1,000 local households and 15 schools.
• GIS-based landscape analysis and planning skills.
• Advice and assistance for installing composting toilets for schools and roadsides.
• Advice and assistance for installing rainwater collection systems for homes and schools.
• Advice, training, and equipment for emergency medical services in a remote and under-served location.
• Long-term assistance with local health care and education.

Those interested in offering their services to the Gishwati Area Conservation Program or simply learning more about the project should contact Great Ape Trust Communications Director Al Setka at asetka@greatapetrust.org.