All in the Family

In the westernmost part of Tanzania, nestled between the shore of Lake Tanganyika and the crest of the Great Rift Valley, lies Gombe National Park.

Lake Tanganyika, the world’s 2^nd deepest lake, which contains 18% of the world’s fresh water!

Hiking in the forest, tree-covered hills, and the 83 foot Kakombe Waterfall are all beautiful and all valid reasons to make a trip to this 32.5 square mile park.

But the reasons I’ve dreamed of a trip to Gombe since I was a small girl, are smaller, darker, and a lot more mobile:

Gombe National Park is not only home to 600 species of trees and shrubs, but also home to 110 chimpanzees.

These chimps, along with their ancestors, have been the subject of the longest study of any wildlife population in the world. In July 1960, Jane Goodall, with very little formal training, was sent to Gombe National Park to study chimpanzees. A one or two year study was planned to study these animals, who share 98.7% of human genetic material. That one year study turned into 52 years and is still ongoing!

Chimpanzees are great apes, along with gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, and humans. In 1900, there were over 2 million chimpanzees in Africa. Today there are less than 150,000. Fortunately, the chimpanzees of Gombe have been protected since 1943.

Chimpanzees have brown eyes and long black hair covering all of their body except the face, ears, fingers, and toes. They walk on all fours, but, when standing fully erect, are up to 4 ½ feet tall and males can weigh up to 110 pounds. Despite their smaller size, chimpanzees are three times stronger than their cousins, human beings.

Babies are born with light pink skin and a tuft of white hair where a tail would be (apes have no tails). Their pink skin darkens as they mature and the white tuft disappears by 8 years old.

As with many humans, chimpanzee hair can show their age – as they get older, the hair changes to brown or gray and baldness occurs in later years. Most chimps live to 30 but they can live up to 50 years or more. Females can even give birth into their late 40’s.

Chimpanzees, like most primates, interact with each other by grooming. Grooming does help to clean their coat and remove parasites, but more importantly, it serves to calm and relax individuals and to bond the community.

Through the chimpanzee studies at Gombe, researchers have learned that chimps are tool-makers (a skill previously attributed only to humans) and meat eaters. Chimpanzees hunt as a group, share food, and communicate with each other through punching, kissing, even embracing!

Chimpanzees feed for 6 hours per day, about 60% of which is fruit. However, they have been observed hunting as a group – surrounding their prey and blocking all escape routes. In fact, at Gombe, chimpanzees have a successful hunt rate of 40% with colobus monkeys and 67% with bush pigs (two of their favorite prey). Interestingly, lions have a success rate of only 20% -- it is the ability to reason and determine the probability of success before undertaking a hunt that gives chimpanzees their success.

For primate lovers, Gombe isn’t home only to chimpanzees. These forests also house blue monkeys, red-tailed monkeys, red colobus, and olive baboons.

In fact, in addition to the long-running chimpanzee study, olive baboons have been studied at Gombe since 1967.

While I am always thrilled to see monkeys, walking through the jungle and discovering our closest relatives just a few feet away, was awe-inspiring. I'm so thankful to have had the opportunity to spend a few hours with several of the family groups in Gombe!

The sign when you enter Gombe National Park says “Care, conserve, and protect for future generations.”

I sincerely hope that future generations of humans and chimpanzees have the opportunity to share a quite moment looking directly into the eyes of their extended family.

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