LONDON, July 12 — With no threat from predators and a stable habitat, chimpanzees in captivity can be sedentary.
Like humans, this can lead to obesity and other illnesses.
British scientists have developed a computer programme that encourages chimps to keep their wild side.
“Zookeepers will collect data on their animals in terms of their locomotion, their social behaviour and their cognition, and upload it to the tool that we’ve created. And the tool will compare the behaviour of their chimpanzees to the behaviours exhibited by chimps in the wild,” Dr Susannah Thorpe, a senior lecturer at University of Birmingham said.
Such data helped design the chimps’ enclosure here at Twycross Zoo in the English Midlands.
Chimpanzees could become extinct in the wild in 20 years.
Preserving their cognitive ability is now just as important, say scientists.
“We’re not just worried about conserving the animal’s DNA anymore; we need to be conserving the whole repertoire for that species. So that includes its behaviour, how it moves, how it uses the area it lives in.... and actually keep all of those things so we’re protecting the whole organism and not just the physical body of the animal,” Dr Charlotte MacDonald, director of life sciences at Twycross Zoo said.
The Enclosure Design Tool aims to keep the chimpanzees physically and mentally active, and socially interactive.
“If you make it so they can move from one to the other of those resources by moving off the ground on arboreal routes then they’ll automatically be spending more time off the ground and this will reflect more accurately the kind of travel behaviour that chimpanzees show in the wild,” senior lecturer at University of BIrmingham Dr Jackie Chappell said.
Arm-hanging from flexible straps, as well as bending and moving around different structures, helps the chimps develop a more natural musculo-skeletal system.
The researchers hope this could soon help with reintroducing chimps from rehabilitation centres into the wild.
They’re now refining the tool’s user interface, with ambitions to incorporate it into an app for smart phones and tablets. — Reuters
