Apes on the Edge: Chimpanzee Life on the West African Savanna

A moving story of survival and an eye-opening introduction to an extraordinary community of chimps and people.

Fongoli chimpanzees are unique for many reasons. Their female hunters are the only apes that regularly hunt with tools, seeking out tiny bush babies with wooden spears. Unlike most other chimps, these apes fear neither water nor fire, using shallow pools to cool off in the Senegalese heat. Up to 90 percent of their home range burns annually--the result of human hunting or clearing for gold mining--and Fongoli chimpanzees have learned to predict the movement of such fires and to avoid them.

The study of Fongoli chimps is also unique. While most primate research occurs in isolated reserves, Fongoli chimpanzees live alongside humans, and as primatologist and anthropologist Jill Pruetz reports, this shared habitat creates both challenges and opportunities. The issues faced by Fongoli chimpanzees--particularly food scarcity and environmental degradation--are also issues faced by their human neighbors. This connection is one reason Pruetz, who has studied Fongoli apes for over two decades, created the nonprofit Neighbor Ape in 2008 to provide for the welfare of the humans who share their landscape with apes. It is also why Pruetz decided to write this book, the first to offer readers a view of these chimps’ lives and to explain the specific conservation efforts needed to help them. Incorporating stories from Pruetz’s time in the field, including the compelling rescue of a young chimp from poachers, Apes on the Edge opens a fascinating window into primate research, conservation, and the inner workings of a very special population of our closest nonhuman relatives.

Jill Pruetz is professor of anthropology at Texas State University. She has studied primates in Kenya, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, and Peru, and, since 2001, has been the principal investigator of the Fongoli Savanna Chimpanzee Project in Senegal. She is the author of The Socioecology of Adult Female Patas Monkeys and Vervets in Kenya as well as the children’s book You Can Be a Primatologist.