As an agricultural leader, the University is well-known for its research on cows, pigs and other livestock. African apes are not among the state’s most noted subjects.
But on the St. Paul campus, primates are growing more prominent, as the Jane Goodall Institute’s Center for Primate Studies is bringing the University international attention for research on humanity’s closest relative in the animal kingdom.
The center, founded in 1995, houses the field notes generated by an ongoing 35-year study of primates at the Gombe Stream Research Center in Tanzania, East Africa. Analysis of the 250,000-page archive is expected to speed up when the notes are scanned to CD-ROM later this year.
The center gets about $50,000 a year from the National Science Foundation, as well as smaller grants from other sources.
Investigators at Gombe take notes on the activities, movements and eating habits of chimps and baboons. Many notes taken by local researchers have to be translated from Swahili before they can be analyzed.
The Gombe research was initiated by British biologist Jane Goodall in 1960, but she is no longer directly involved.
“Jane Goodall has written a lot about the chimps, of course. But in the last few years she has been more concerned with travelling the world and conserving chimps in general,” said Anne Pusey, the director of the St. Paul center.
Pusey said Goodall plans to visit the center on April 19 and speak to the public.
While doing research in Gombe as a graduate student, Pusey studied the process by which young chimps become independent of their mothers.
“I found that mothers don’t really force their chimps to leave,” Pusey said. “The males become interested in other males, so they start leaving their mothers to join the gang,” Pusey said.
To avoid mating with close relatives, female chimps will suddenly leave their mothers and go to another group when they reach adolescence.
“That was actually the question that really got me back into looking at the data some more,” Pusey said. “I wanted to see if we could figure out what determined which females left and why.”
To get the answer, Pusey approached Goodall and asked if Pusey could look through some of the unanalyzed field notes produced in Gombe.
“The result of that was that we decided to bring all of the data that was really sitting in some rather insecure places in Africa to Minnesota so that we could preserve it and computerize the data,” Pusey said.
With visualization and database software produced by collaborators in the University’s computer science department, chimpanzee movements during many years can be mapped. The software allows these movements to be correlated with such factors as access to food and success in raising children.
“We can use all the data to show things like, what are the characteristics of a highly dominant female or male,” Pusey said. “We’ve been looking at the effect of female dominance rank on reproductive success, and we have found that that’s actually very important.”
Possible explanations for the success of dominant females include access to better food and stronger social alliances, Pusey said.
“We also want to see if the way that food is distributed influences the way females are distributed and the way the males gain access to females,” Pusey said.
Chimps live in groups of about 40 to 45 individuals, with the adult males patrolling the group’s territory against intrusion from other groups.
“If they meet males from other groups, they have sometimes violent interactions with them. So part of the territorial rearrangements have to do with how strong the males are. But it may also have to do with where the food is,” Pusey said.
Because a chimpanzee female may mate with many males, it is not possible to tell who the father of a chimp is from observation. So the center is also attempting to determine genetic relationships from DNA extracted from dung and hair.