Fergie's Tech Blog

Friday Monkey Blogging: Chimps 90% Gone in a 'Final Stronghold'

As I mentioned last Friday, I have started a regularly recurring blog entry meme every Friday afternoon, inspired by Bruce Schneier's regular series of "Friday Squid Blogging" posts, and my very own maddening Monkey Theory.

This week's installment via National Geographic News.

West African chimpanzees have declined by 90 percent in the last 18 years in an African country that is one of the subspecies' "final strongholds," a new study stays.

Scientists counting the rare chimps in Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) found only about 800 to 1,200 of the apes—down from about 8,000 to 12,000 in 1989-90. Before the new survey, the country had been thought to harbor about half of all West African chimps.

"We were not expecting such a drastic decrease," said lead author Geneviève Campbell, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

The 1989-90 survey had itself represented a significant decline from 1960s estimates of about a hundred thousand West African Chimps in Côte d'Ivoire.

posted by Fergie @ 10/17/2008 05:07:00 PM