Removing snares is an effective conservation intervention: a case study involving chimpanzees.

Wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are caught in snares set for other animals and sometimes injure or lose body parts. Snaring can compromise the health, growth, survival, and behavior of chimpanzees and, thus, represents a threat for the conservation of this endangered species. During a long-term study of chimpanzees at Ngogo in Kibale National Park, Uganda, we started a project to remove snares in and around their territory.

A roadmap for high-throughput sequencing studies of wild animal populations using noninvasive samples and hybridization capture.

Large-scale genomic studies of wild animal populations are often limited by access to high-quality DNA. Although noninvasive samples, such as faeces, can be readily collected, DNA from the sample producers is usually present in low quantities, fragmented, and contaminated by microorganism and dietary DNAs. Hybridization capture can help to overcome these impediments by increasing the proportion of subject DNA prior to high-throughput sequencing.

How old are chimpanzee communities? Time to the most recent common ancestor of the Y-chromosome in highly patrilocal societies.

Many human societies are patrilineal, with males passing on their name or descent group affiliation to their offspring. Y-chromosomes are also passed on from father to son, leading to the simple expectation that males sharing the same surname or descent group membership should have similar Y-chromosome haplotypes. Although several studies in patrilineal human societies have examined the correspondence between Y-chromosome variation and surname or descent group membership, similar studies in non-human animals are lacking.

Genetic analyses suggest no immigration of adult females and their offspring into the Sonso community of chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest Reserve, Uganda.

Chimpanzees are frequently used to illustrate the relationship between sex differences in dispersal and sex differences in cooperation in primates and other group-living mammals. Male chimpanzees are highly philopatric, typically remaining in their natal communities for their entire lives to cooperate with related males in competition against less related males from other groups, whereas females typically disperse once at adolescence and cooperate with each other less frequently. However, there have been a few reports of dependent male offspring joining groups when their mothers transferred between communities as adults.

Generation times in wild chimpanzees and gorillas suggest earlier divergence times in great ape and human evolution.

Fossils and molecular data are two independent sources of information that should in principle provide consistent inferences of when evolutionary lineages diverged. Here we use an alternative approach to genetic inference of species split times in recent human and ape evolution that is independent of the fossil record. We first use genetic parentage information on a large number of wild chimpanzees and mountain gorillas to directly infer their average generation times.

Genetic differentiation and the evolution of cooperation in chimpanzees and humans.

It has been proposed that human cooperation is unique among animals for its scale and complexity, its altruistic nature and its occurrence among large groups of individuals that are not closely related or are even strangers. One potential solution to this puzzle is that the unique aspects of human cooperation evolved as a result of high levels of lethal competition (i.e.