Credit: Jack Lester

Endangered chimpanzees could be adapting to landscapes that have been broken up by human activity.

Eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) were thought to exist in low numbers in an area of Uganda where forest has been fragmented by farms and villages (pictured). Maureen McCarthy and Linda Vigilant of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and their colleagues collected and genetically analysed hundreds of chimp droppings from about 630 square kilometres of fragmented habitat. They estimate that some 260 chimps in 9 communities live in about 1,200 square kilometres of what seems to be marginal habitat at best — more than 3 times the number of chimps that were previously estimated to live in this habitat.

The authors suggest that these and other rare species might be more adaptable — at least in the short term — than was thought.

BMC Ecol. http://doi.org/66q (2015)