Dr Roman Wittig has an open heart: "We need to work with the local population who live on the border of the Taï National Park. They need to understand the dangers and risks involved in hunting and eating forest animals".

Ange Koné Aminata : Can you introduce yourself ?

Roman Wittig : I’m doctor Roman Wittig. I’m the director of the Taï Chimpanzee Project (TCP) since 2012. I am observing the behaviour of the wild chimpanzees in the Taï National Park since 1996.

The Taï Chimpanzee Project was founded in 1979 by Christophe Boesch. He came to the Taï National Park to understand the tool–use behavior of chimpanzees. This is making the project one of the longest-lasting chimpanzee observation programms in the world.

A.K.A : Because of the richness and uniqueness of TAI National Park has been a world heritage site since 1982. In your opinion, what has this added ?

R.W. : The Taï National Park has already the highest conservation protection. It is classified as an UNESCO World Heritage Site. Nobody should enter or take out anything without permission.

Nonetheless, traditionally the people of the region go into the forest and hunt the animals for bush meat. Hunting is unfortunately still a big problem in the Taï National Park, although the park authorities do their best to reduce this.

Now the fields go streight to the border of the National Park. Twenty-five years ago, most of these fields were not existing yet. When I came for the first time to Taï, I was still driving through large forests before I actually reached the National Park border. Now, this forest has been transformed into cocoa, caoutchouc, and coffee fields. There is no forest anymore before the park border.

Finally, there is another problem. Since chimpanzees are our closest living relatives we can transmit diseases to them and they can transmit diseases to us. Such zoonotic disease transmissions can become problematic for the health of one species, as we know from the Covid19 pandemic. What is a simple cold for us can be dealy for chimpanzees.

None of these problems are solved by just creating a National Park, a World Heritage Site. Protection needs to be implmented in a sustainable way. We need to improve our protection against poaching, habitat loss or disease transmission.

A.K.A : What should be done to ensure that the rules are obeyed ?

R.W. : Actions on the different levels need to be taken in combination. First, we need to work together with the local population living around the border of the National Park. They need to understand the danger and the risks they are taking when hunting and eating the animals in the forest. Such awarness campaigns we run together with our partners, the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation and the Office Ivoirien des Parcs et Réserves ( OIPR).

The next is the national level. The potential threat to the human population due to hunting and biodiversity loss is an important factor for Ivory Coast. The loss of forest is nothing that will recover in a few years, it will take decades.

Finally there is the international level where we need support from other governments, that understand the chimpanzee of west Africa is critically endangered. They have gone through a tremendous decrease over the past twenty-five years, more than 80% of the population was lost during one genration.

So on international level, we need to find a way to reinforce international protection to the species. In the end, they should be protected from pet trade, should not be hunted for bush meat, and we should not destroy their habitat.

A.K.A : Why is the Taï national park so important for the study of chimpanzees ? 

R.W. : There are several reasons for this. First of all, the Tai chimpanzees have a very unique culture. Chimpanzees have different cultures, depending on where they are born, like humans. They learn from their mothers. They learn from their peers about how to be a chimpanzee.

In the Taï national park, they have created over generations a nut cracking culture and this nut cracking culture is given from one generation to the next one. So it’s very important to understand the uniqueness of each chimpanzee population. And the chimpanzees in the Taï national park are especially collaborative. They have collaborative hunting techniques, they collaborate on many other levels and this make them a little bit special in comparison to many of the chimpanzees in other populations, where individuals are more competitive within the group.

And then there is another reason, in our research for our closest living relatives we understand about ourselves, we understand why we are aggressive or why we are able to build a spaceship to fly to the moon

Because this basis of understanding of how cultures are built and how the knowledge is transmitted has shaped our own evolution. This helps us to understand where we are coming from and what the bases are of our behaviour?

A.K.A : Do you think that this collaborative way makes them stronger to survive ?

R.W. : Individuals that collaborate better, have advantages in reproducing. This means a collaborative groups are better in solving group problems, than a non-collaborative group, and in the end they have better survival.

A.K.A : Could you share with us some interesting results ?

R.W. : I think one of the most intersting results in the last years is how chimpanzees deal with losing their mother. There are quite a lot of orphans in the Tai communities. Some of the mothers have been killed by poachers, some were killed by the leopard, some died of a disease.

An infant needs support from their mothers until they are five or six years old, if they want to survive. If orphans are younger the only chance to survive is that somebody adopts you. Some adult chimpanzees adopt orphans. This is something very uncommon in animals; something we believe is typically human. However, chimpanzees have empathy. They adopt these little ones to help them. These are not only relatives that do this, but even the unrelated chimpanzees. One result is that hese orphans need to learn even longer than if their mothers are still with them. They need still to learn longer about how to crack nuts for example. So their learning curves are not the same, it’s a little bit like what we’ve known from humans about the children who lose their parents.

They are not only deprived of love, but they are deprived of social content, that’s they are deprived of learning, they are deprived of peers. All of this happens to the orphans of chimpanzees.

A.K.A : Very interesting. Even if about animals, Is it a « personal decision for one female? or is it the pressure of the community which makes a chimpanzee to adopt an orphan ?

Many times males adopt the orphans. One reason might be the hypothesis of the strong community: the more members, and especially males, a community has the better the community can. As a result they can compete better against other communities. This means that males potentially help their own offsping living in a stronger community by adopting and supporting orphans. This way all young do better in the future. 

A.K.A : What do you want to add to this interview? May be there is something you want to tell me that I didn’t ask you about ?

R.W. : I are at the brink of loosing the battle against loosing the existing chimpanzee populations. Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. They are more than 99% human, they are closer related to us humans than they are to gorillas. This means a chimpanzee is more human than it is gorilla.

Nontheless our closest living relative is at the brink of extinction. And this is our doing! We really need to support the remaining populations in the wild so that they have a future and we can continue learning from them about our own past. Once they are gone we will never understand how our own evolution has worked. Maybe why we became what we are.

A.K.A : How many chimpanzees are there in Taï forest ?

R.W. : This is an excellent question. The official numbersof OIPR’s yearly survey of the park is only 400. Twenty-five years ago they were about three thousand ( 3000) chimps left in the Taï National Park which is a park of ( 4500) four thousand five hundred square kilo meters. With the about 400 (four hundred) chimpanzees left, we have lost about eighty to ninety percent of the population. We have learned that we need to do something about this loss. We hope to increase the population again. Since we have several strong populations in the center of the research area, from there the chimpanzees can repopulate the forest under the conditions that there are no poachers, there are no fields and no disease transmission from humans.

A.K.A : How do they support captivity ?

R.W. : Many zoos are keeping chimpanzees. However the more we learn about them , the more we understand that they have a very strong learning components in their behaviour. We say they have « cultures » and so they need to learn, for example, to use certain tools, or how to behave. Chimpanzees in captivity have not learned from their mothers how to survive in the wild. They have lost their wild identity. The problem is to bring them back into the wild, they do not really know what to eat and how to process it.

Knowing what and how to eat it, knowing and understanding how to communicate are all things they have to learn at a young age over a periods of time; ten fifteen, twenty years..

This interview was conducted by Ms Ange Koné Aminata, Head of the CSRS Communication Unit.