It’s a Tough Life for Chimpanzees in the Savannah
Chimpanzees are generally known as the ripe fruit specialist among the great apes but also incorporate other food items such as leaves and seedpods into their diets.
The Issa Valley in Tanzania is a mosaic habitat made up mainly of gallery forest and woodland savannah.
Credit: Adam van Casteren
The scientists also combined their plant food mechanical data with data from a stable isotope analysis from both plant and chimpanzee hair samples. Carbon stable isotopes are commonly used to reconstruct dietary ecology and habitat use of living and extinct primates. Although the carbon isotope values of plants were remarkably similar in both habitats, the isotope data obtained from chimpanzee hair suggested that savannah chimpanzees frequently feed on plants growing in open canopy areas. These likely include those plants which are particularly demanding when processed with the teeth.
The outer casing of the Strychnos fruit had much higher toughness and stiffness values than the plant tissues the researchers tested from the rainforest.
Dental morphology, food mechanical properties and carbon stable isotopes are all highly relevant for reconstructing past diets of our early ancestors in Africa. “If we better understand the foundations and interactions of food material properties, dental wear processes and isotopes in extant chimpanzees this opens a window into the past and helps to interpret the data obtained from fossil specimens who lived in the African savannah several million years ago,” concludes co-author Vicky Oelze from the University of California in Santa Cruz and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who conducted the stable isotope analysis.
Contacts and sources:
Dr. Adam van Casteren / Dr. Kornelius Kupczik
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
Dr. Vicky M. Oelze
University of California, Santa Cruz
Citation: Food mechanical properties and isotopic signatures in forest versus savannah dwelling eastern chimpanzees. Adam van Casteren, Vicky M. Oelze, Samuel Angedakin, Ammie K. Kalan, Mohamed Kambi, Christophe Boesch, Hjalmar S. Kühl, Kevin E. Langergraber, Alexander K. Piel, Fiona A. Stewart, Kornelius Kupczik: Communications Biology, 10 August 2018
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2018/08/its-tough-life-for-chimpanzees-in.html
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