Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
LET’S GO APE, DAD!
From big softie silverbacks to the secret language of chimps, an epic new series delves into the private lives of primates
Macho is out-dated. All the girls in the Virunga mountains want a New Man... or rather, a New Gorilla. In this troop of mountain gorillas on the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the most successful alphas are the most caring silverbacks.
For one father, that means letting his toddler son use him as a climbing frame. A camera team for BBC1’S epic new three-part documentary Primates watches the child clambering all over his 500lb parent. He scrambles up Dad’s back to his head. He gets lifted down, gently but firmly. Excited, the toddler crawls up his father’s arm, across his shoulders. The adult peels him off.
Then the youngster bounds out of shot and swings in on a vine, like Tarzan, straight into Dad’s head. At no point does the giant alpha male lose his cool.
Later, he lulls the toddler to sleep on the jungle floor in a picture of devotion that can’t fail to touch your heart. ‘The great apes have excellent memories,’ says Chris Packham, who narrates the show. ‘Like us, they are constantly observing each other, which changes how they manage relationships. They remember which males make good dads.’
Researchers have noted gentle dads have five times as many offspring as more aggressive males. For silverbacks with ambitions to be king of the forest, one tactic is to let the kids walk all over you...
If that sounds like human behaviour, so does the extraordinary secret language of chimpanzees, decoded by Dr Cat Hobaiter. In the Budongo forest of Uganda, she has been following a family for years, watching their individual quirks minutely.
‘It’s like trying to decode alien communication, you’re starting from scratch,’ says Dr Hobaiter.
Her breakthrough came upon realising she had to understand why a gesture ceases to be given. For instance, when a chimp tells a younger one to ‘move yourself’, they raise an arm. Dr Hobaiter only understood this by observing how chimps responded to the signal... and noting the gesture ceased when another chimp moved along.
When a mother on all fours flicks up a back foot it’s a sign to her baby to climb aboard, and a branch held by the teeth shows a readiness to play, maybe implying, ‘Look, I can’t bite!’ Researchers know chimps also use sticks as tools. One scene reveals a technique never before filmed – chimps dredging up tasty weeds in a swamp with a stick.
But the big revelation in this series is that many kinds of primates have learned to use tools. On Coram Island off Thailand, a colony of long-tailed macaques have perfected using pointed rocks as chisels to dislodge shellfish from the rocks exposed at low tide. Using heavier rocks as hammers, they then smash open the shells and enjoy a meal.
The macaques do this so well that shellfish on Coram are in decline. It’s the first instance recorded of environmental damage caused by animals with tools. They could almost be human!
In Bangkok, urban macaques are known to pluck a strand of hair from tourists to use as dental floss. In Bali, they loot jewellery and sunglasses and the tourists have to hand over fruit to get their stuff back. Apparently crime can pay, for a monkey.
For Chris, the most astonishing sequence shows a different behaviour. On the African plains, a leopard is hunting a young baboon. Bloodied and terrified, the ape scrambles up a tree. But leopards can climb – and this one is intent on catching it. ‘You’re transported from your sofa into a thrilling hunt,’ says Chris.
Just as the baboon seems doomed, his troop appears. Bravely, they leap into the tree, chattering and jeering, to distract the leopard. The wounded animal drops to the ground and limps away. The leopard is left in the tree with an angry mob of baboons. The message is plain: don’t mess with primates.