First ever picture of chimp feasting on a tortoise
IT’S a thorny moral dilemma for conservationists – what do you do when you find one endangered species eating another?
Wild chimpanzees have been observed smashing open the shells of tortoises before scooping out the meat to eat.
In what they claim is a first, scientists saw the behaviour repeatedly at Loango National Park in Gabon, west Africa.
Researcher Tobias Deschner suggested in a report that because the park has abundant hard-shelled fruit that also needs to be whacked against trees to open, enterprising chimpanzees learned to do the same to tortoises.
Mr Deschner, of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, said: ‘They see this is a hardshelled object with some interesting thing inside and I need to crack it open.
‘If I can do that with the fruit and have the same problem with a hard-shelled animal with something inside that I want to get access to, then I can say, “OK, why not do it in exactly the same way?”’
The report’s authors said weaker chimpanzees passed their tortoises to stronger adults to break open and then share the meal among the whole group.
A male was seen eating half a tortoise, then tucking the shell into a tree and coming back the next day to finish it, suggesting chimpanzees plan ahead, according to the study in the journal Scientific Reports.