Tokyo

Bonobos: endangered on more than one front. Credit: BBC NATURAL HISTORY UNIT

Future research on the rarest and least-known species of great ape is being seriously endangered by the intensifying civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to leading primate researchers.

They believe that threats to the wild population of bonobos (Pan paniscus ), or pygmy chimpanzees, could jeopardize ongoing studies of their life histories and evolution. Work following up suggestions that bonobos might be useful in research on the origins of AIDS could also be harmed.

Wild bonobos are found only in Congo. Their population was estimated at around 10,000 in 1996, but is thought to have halved over the past few years as a result of habitat loss and an increase in hunting for their meat. The recent outbreak of armed conflict within core bonobo habitats is believed to have reduced their numbers still further.

“Ongoing [great ape] conservation programmes are subject to severe disruption all too often,” says Richard Wrangham, a Harvard University primatologist. He notes that more than two-thirds of 23 protected areas containing great apes have been disturbed by military conflicts during the past ten years.

“Since bonobos were the last of the great apes to be studied, their life history is yet to be understood,” says Takayoshi Kano, a primate researcher at Kyoto University, who launched a pioneering study on wild bonobos in 1973. “Even if bonobos do survive the ravages of war, their population will have been disrupted, and beginning a fresh study on a different group would be an unthinkably daunting task.”

As human contact with bonobos increases with accelerated hunting — which often involves primitive butchery — there is growing concern over the risks that the apes could transmit disease to humans. Particularly in the light of the recent discovery that primate retroviruses can be transmitted to humans relatively easily through hunting.

Recent findings that HIV-1 might have arisen from chimpanzees in central Africa have triggered interest in bonobos as a research subject, although SIV — the ape equivalent of HIV — has not been detected from the handful of bonobo samples that have been tested so far.