From mines to chimp research

MICHEL Tama Sadiakhou’s future dramatically changed course some 15 years ago thanks to a clan of spear-wielding apes: instead of the dangerous work in informal gold mines that is the fate of many in Senegal’s far southeast, he now researches rare chimpanzees.

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RESEARCHER Jacques Tamba Keita listens as he tracks down West african chimpanzees on the Fongoli home range in the Kedougou region.

(AFP)

He is among five people from local villages, all but one without a high school diploma, working on a project focused on the area’s highly unusual savannah-dwelling chimpanzees.

Not only has it proven a deep dive into science, but for several of them, it has also offered an escape from the mines.

“It’s really a stroke of luck,” Sadiakhou told AFP of his involvement in the Fongoli Savanna Chimpanzee Project, which was founded by US primatologist Jill Pruetz in 2001.

Pruetz has made a number of discoveries while studying a community of about three dozen West African chimpanzees, which she dubbed the Fongoli chimps.

The group lives in the bush - rather than the forest as is more common ~ alongside other similar chimp communities in Senegal’s Kedougou region on the border with Mali and Guinea.

The Fongoli females are the only documented animals in the world to regularly hunt with tools, fashioning branches into spears for killing smaller primates known as a bush babies.

Ona recent morning, Mike, a charismatic, middle-aged chimp, ambled along the savannah floor, baobab fruit dangling by a stem from his mouth - a snack for later - as Sadiakhou watched.