National Geographic: The New Chimpanzees Page #4

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Freud settles down to share

with his allies.

Meat is a valuable currency

, a payment for favors.

Females come begging for a taste.

The orphan, Mel, searches for scraps

but he's soon sent packing.

Frodo, frustrated and hungry,

tries to muscle his way

to a place at the table.

But Freud will have none of

it leaving Frodo to rage.

His friends rush in to placate him

to little effect.

With up to 11 males hunting together,

multiple kills are common at Gombe.

As many as seven monkeys

have been taken on a single hunt.

Chimps like a little salad

with their entree.

They often eat leaves

when they eat meat,

sometimes eating kinds

they never touch otherwise.

On average, the Gombe chimps consume

in their range each year.

A taste for meat begins early.

The free for all approach to

hunting works well in Gombe's low

and relatively open woodland.

Catching monkeys high in the treetops

requires a different strategy elsewhere

Christophe Boesch studies chimps

in the Tai forest of the Cote d'Ivoire

prime African rainforest.

Most chimps live in green

and shadowy depths like these.

The forest canopy an interwoven web

floats over a hundred feet above its

reflection in tea colored pools below.

Following his chimps,

he's discovered that they're capable of

an extraordinary level of cooperation.

I mean, the chimps of the Tai forest

or the tropical rainforest.

The canopy layer is continuous,

the biggest mammal they hunt,

the red colobus, they are about

a third the weight of the chimps,

what means that when colobus sit

on a thin branch,

the chimps can't go there,

if he go there,

he fall down on the ground.

So, there is a big problem,

they have to use,

solve it and the only way to

solve it here is by hunting in group.

So that a chimp will drive

the prey away in a given direction,

so that the colobus are constantly

moving in this direction,

and the driver is really just

pushing them in a direction,

he's not trying to capture them,

that is, he's not running,

you see that he's just walking

in a constant direction.

This gives them the constant direction

of flight,

where the chimps on the ground can

then organize them and,

if they see that the group splits

too much in different directions,

you would have blockers,

individuals that come up in specific

trees where colobus might escape,

sort of keep them

in constant direction.

And so that, gives them the possibility

for them to make the kind of a trap.

So that, by having a driver behind,

some blockers on the side,

they just need somebody actually

to come in front of them,

ahead of the movement, and to

then close the trap, if you want.

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