🐾 Chimpanzee

Chimpanzee

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Who it is

• Scientific name: Pan troglodytes
• Family & relatives: A great ape in the family Hominidae; along with the bonobo it is our closest living relative.
• How to spot it: A muscular black-haired ape with a bare face, large ears, long arms, and expressive eyes.

Its body & abilities

• Size: Standing about 1 to 1.7 m tall.
• Weight: Males about 40 to 60 kg, females 27 to 50 kg.
• Body & adaptations: Opposable thumbs and big toes plus a large brain let it make and use tools with great skill.
• Top speed: Can run on the ground at about 40 km/h (25 mph) in short bursts.
• Strength: Far stronger than a human for its size, an adult chimp can pull with striking force and climb powerfully.
• Senses: Keen eyesight, hearing, and smell, with color vision much like our own.
• Growing up: An infant clings to its mother for years, is weaned around age four to five, and matures near thirteen.

Where it lives

• Habitat: Tropical rainforests, woodlands, and savanna mosaics.
• Where in the world: Equatorial Africa, from West Africa across to the central and eastern regions.
• Territory: Communities defend territories that can range from about 5 to over 50 square km.

What it eats

• Diet: Omnivore relying mostly on fruit, drinking from streams or using chewed leaves as sponges.
• Favorite foods: Mainly fruit and plants, plus insects, honey, eggs, and sometimes small mammals like monkeys.
• How it hunts: It forages in groups and uses tools, such as poking sticks into termite mounds and cracking nuts with stones.

How it behaves

• How it moves: Moves on the ground by knuckle-walking and climbs and swings through trees.
• When it is active: Diurnal, foraging by day and building a fresh leafy nest to sleep in each night.
• Family life: Highly social, living in fission-fusion communities (troops) of a few dozen individuals.
• How it talks: Uses a rich mix of calls, facial expressions, gestures, and grooming to bond and signal.
• Babies: After about an 8-month gestation a single infant is born; mothers invest years in intensive care.

Its place in nature

• Role in nature: An important seed disperser and predator; leopards and, rarely, other chimpanzees are its main threats.
• Conservation: Listed as Endangered by the IUCN, threatened by habitat loss, poaching, and disease.
• Dangers: Dies from disease, poaching, habitat loss, and sometimes conflict between communities.

Life & legacy

• How long it lives: Around 33 years in the wild and up to about 50 or more in captivity.
• In our culture: Famous through the research of Jane Goodall, who first documented their tool use and complex societies.
• Where to see it: Gombe and Mahale in Tanzania, Kibale in Uganda, and accredited sanctuaries and zoos.
• Fun fact: Chimpanzees share roughly 98 to 99 percent of their DNA with humans.