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Wild Chimpanzees on the Edge: Nocturnal Activities in Croplands

In a rapidly changing landscape highly impacted by anthropogenic activities, the great apes are facing new challenges to coexist with humans. For chimpanzee communities inhabiting encroached territories, not bordered by rival conspecifics but by human agricultural fields, such boundaries are risky a...

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Autores principales: Krief, Sabrina, Cibot, Marie, Bortolamiol, Sarah, Seguya, Andrew, Krief, Jean-Michel, Masi, Shelly
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4206271/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25338066
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0109925
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author Krief, Sabrina
Cibot, Marie
Bortolamiol, Sarah
Seguya, Andrew
Krief, Jean-Michel
Masi, Shelly
author_facet Krief, Sabrina
Cibot, Marie
Bortolamiol, Sarah
Seguya, Andrew
Krief, Jean-Michel
Masi, Shelly
author_sort Krief, Sabrina
collection PubMed
description In a rapidly changing landscape highly impacted by anthropogenic activities, the great apes are facing new challenges to coexist with humans. For chimpanzee communities inhabiting encroached territories, not bordered by rival conspecifics but by human agricultural fields, such boundaries are risky areas. To investigate the hypothesis that they use specific strategies for incursions out of the forest into maize fields to prevent the risk of detection by humans guarding their field, we carried out video recordings of chimpanzees at the edge of the forest bordered by a maize plantation in Kibale National Park, Uganda. Contrary to our expectations, large parties are engaged in crop-raids, including vulnerable individuals such as females with clinging infants. More surprisingly chimpanzees were crop-raiding during the night. They also stayed longer in the maize field and presented few signs of vigilance and anxiety during these nocturnal crop-raids. While nocturnal activities of chimpanzees have been reported during full moon periods, this is the first record of frequent and repeated nocturnal activities after twilight, in darkness. Habitat destruction may have promoted behavioural adjustments such as nocturnal exploitation of open croplands.
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spelling pubmed-42062712014-10-27 Wild Chimpanzees on the Edge: Nocturnal Activities in Croplands Krief, Sabrina Cibot, Marie Bortolamiol, Sarah Seguya, Andrew Krief, Jean-Michel Masi, Shelly PLoS One Research Article In a rapidly changing landscape highly impacted by anthropogenic activities, the great apes are facing new challenges to coexist with humans. For chimpanzee communities inhabiting encroached territories, not bordered by rival conspecifics but by human agricultural fields, such boundaries are risky areas. To investigate the hypothesis that they use specific strategies for incursions out of the forest into maize fields to prevent the risk of detection by humans guarding their field, we carried out video recordings of chimpanzees at the edge of the forest bordered by a maize plantation in Kibale National Park, Uganda. Contrary to our expectations, large parties are engaged in crop-raids, including vulnerable individuals such as females with clinging infants. More surprisingly chimpanzees were crop-raiding during the night. They also stayed longer in the maize field and presented few signs of vigilance and anxiety during these nocturnal crop-raids. While nocturnal activities of chimpanzees have been reported during full moon periods, this is the first record of frequent and repeated nocturnal activities after twilight, in darkness. Habitat destruction may have promoted behavioural adjustments such as nocturnal exploitation of open croplands. Public Library of Science 2014-10-22 /pmc/articles/PMC4206271/ /pubmed/25338066 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0109925 Text en © 2014 Krief et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Krief, Sabrina
Cibot, Marie
Bortolamiol, Sarah
Seguya, Andrew
Krief, Jean-Michel
Masi, Shelly
Wild Chimpanzees on the Edge: Nocturnal Activities in Croplands
title Wild Chimpanzees on the Edge: Nocturnal Activities in Croplands
title_full Wild Chimpanzees on the Edge: Nocturnal Activities in Croplands
title_fullStr Wild Chimpanzees on the Edge: Nocturnal Activities in Croplands
title_full_unstemmed Wild Chimpanzees on the Edge: Nocturnal Activities in Croplands
title_short Wild Chimpanzees on the Edge: Nocturnal Activities in Croplands
title_sort wild chimpanzees on the edge: nocturnal activities in croplands
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4206271/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25338066
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0109925
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