Chimpanzee

The chimpanzee is a great ape, not a monkey, that lives in the forests and savannas of equatorial Africa. Together with its cousin the bonobo, it is the closest living relative of humans: when matching stretches of chimp and human DNA are compared, they differ by only about one and a half percent. Chimps are covered in coarse black hair, but their faces, fingers, palms and the soles of their feet are bare.

Chimpanzees are clever, social animals. They live in communities that can have more than 200 members, talk to each other with calls, faces and gestures, and use tools more than almost any other animal. Sadly, they are endangered. Scientists estimate that roughly 170,000 to 300,000 remain in the wild, down from around a million in the early 1900s, mainly because of forest loss, hunting and disease.

Where it lives

Chimpanzees are found across a belt of Africa near the equator, from West Africa to Tanzania. They can live in many kinds of places: rainforests, mountain forests, swamp forests, dry woodlands and grassy savannas. Scientists recognise four subspecies, or local types. The chimps of Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire belong to the western group. Every evening a chimp bends branches together high in a tree to make a fresh sleeping nest, which it usually uses for just one night.

What it eats

Chimpanzees mostly eat fruit, especially ripe figs, but they also munch leaves, seeds, flowers, bark and insects, and they use sticks to get honey. Sometimes they hunt small animals, most often red colobus monkeys. In Taï forest, a hunting group splits into roles like a team: some chimps drive the monkeys in one direction, others block their escape, some chase, and others wait in ambush. After a successful hunt, the meat is shared with the hunters and even with chimps who were only watching.

Clever tool users

In 1960 the researcher Jane Goodall saw a chimp in Gombe, Tanzania, trim a twig and poke it into a termite mound to fish out termites. It was the first time a non-human animal had been reported making a tool. In West Africa, chimps crack hard nuts by placing them on a flat stone or root, called an anvil, and hitting them with a stone or wooden hammer. Taï chimps choose their hammers carefully, thinking about weight, material and hardness, and how far they would have to carry them. Nut cracking is hard to learn, and in Taï the skill is passed from mothers to their young, who learn it by watching closely for years.

On the globe

The model shows a chimpanzee in Taï National Park, Côte d'Ivoire, where chimps use stones as hammers to crack open nuts. Zoom in on West Africa to find it.