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4 - Odyssey through our forest past
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2015
Summary
Poupée and Malibu as well as Brutus and Falstaff have grown up in the depths of the dense tropical rainforest of Côte d'Ivoire. Their life horizon has always been limited by trees, with a few openings made by treefalls, while the rivers cutting through their range are too small to open up the forest. This kind of forest is predominantly flat, so that even when they climb in the highest trees, the visibility is restricted to the neighbouring trees and the sky. Their home is a large forest tract of over 4 by 5 kilometres that they criss-cross on a weekly basis, and they tend to join the seasonally fruiting trees in straight lines even when these are quite far apart. How do they keep contact with friends and partners in such a forest? How do they know about them, their where-abouts, about potential danger, about all that matters in their social life? Being a social animal in a dense forest presents some very special challenges. Many animal species reacted to such conditions by becoming less social; the lovely red bush pigs with their brushy white ears live in much smaller groups in the forest than in more open habitat, the small forest elephants are mostly solitary compared with the large herds of their savannah counterparts, while the buffaloes are encountered only in tiny groups in the forest. Forest leopards are solitary except for the short mating periods. This contrasts dramatically with the many social carnivores living in the savannah. How do chimpanzees manage to remain so highly social in the forest?
FROM DAWN TO DUSK IN THE FOREST
Early one morning, I managed to catch up with Salomé whose fertile period was visibly culminating as all the males were in a craze, following her through the woods, the swamp, up and down trees.
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- The Real ChimpanzeeSex Strategies in the Forest, pp. 60 - 75Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009