Science in the Triangle

The greeting was embracing but inquisitive. It emanated from deep within Jane Goodall and got louder, higher in pitch and more urgent with each bellow.

Goodall, the British primatologist considered the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees, often starts her talks the way chimpanzees greet a new day in Gombe Stream National Park, the Tanzanian reserve where Goodall began her research in 1960 and where the institute she founded in 1977 still has a research project under way.

The greeting, Goodall has said, translates to, “Here I am. Who’s out there?”

Just six days short of her 77th birthday, Goodall stood on stage at the sold-out, 1,200-seat Page Auditorium at Duke University and again greeted her audience in Chimpanzeese.

But this time, she received in-kind answers from the audience. This welcome was special.

The March 28 Duke visit, Goodall’s third since 2007, followed two high-profile recruitments.

A year ago, Anne Pusey, a former field researcher for Goodall in Africa, joined Duke to head the evolutionary anthropology department. Pusey came from the University of Minnesota, home of the Jane Goodall Institute’s research archive since 1995. The archive is a daily expanding compilation of field notes, videos and photos and includes about 22 cabinets of paper files with many of the notes written by Goodall herself.

On March 17, Duke announced that the archive would follow Pusey to North Carolina and 11 days later, Goodall spent a very public day on the Duke campus, meeting journalists, visiting school children and talking about what she learned in the past 50 years.

In Minnesota, Pusey’s departure revived speculations that Goodall’s support for animal rights had ruffled feathers at the University of Minnesota, where researchers do extensive testing on animals, including on monkeys. Animal testing is also done at Duke, including invasive surgery testing on macaques. But joining Duke gained Pusey a distinguished, endowed professorship and a departmental chairmanship. At the University of Minnesota, she held the title of adjunct professor, usually a non-tenured, non-salaried position.

Also, Duke and the Jane Goodall Institute are exploring further collaborations, said Maureen Smith, the institute’s president. Environmental and humanitarian programs Goodall has started since the mid-1980s to preserve the chimpanzees’ rain forest habitat and improve the lives of neighboring villagers may offer research opportunities for Duke’s Nicholas School of the Evironment and Earth Sciences and the Duke Global Health Institute.

When asked at the press conference how she felt about the archive moving, Goodall answered, “I was happy for it to go where it needed to go.”

It was clear she didn’t want to talk about the archive’s 1,000-mile move. The woman, who showed a male-dominated academic world that humans aren’t the only ones using tools and that chimpanzees hunt prey and eat meat, preferred to talk about the encounters she’s had with “the animals that are most like us.”

Goodall’s favorites include stories about Fifi, Little Mama and Jojo.

Fifi was about 2 when Goodall started her Gombe field research in 1960. Monkeys and humans age similarly, as Duke primatologists have found. (More about that here.) And chimpanzees can get as old as humans. But Goodall said that none of the chimpanzees she met in the early 1960s - she called them “her old friends” - are alive anymore. Fifi, the last surviving old friend, died in 2004.

“She almost made it,” Goodall said.

Like her mother, Flo, Fifi was popular with the male chimpanzees and a very successful and caring mother. She gave birth to nine sons and daughters, according to the Jane Goodall Institute a Gombe record. Fifi attained a very high rank in the group and so did several of her sons.

Flo, Fifi and Fifi’s offspring helped Goodall learn a lesson that in retrospect she called one of the most interesting of her career.

“There’s good mothers and bad mothers in chimp society,” Goodall said. “The offspring who have good mothers do better.”

Whether there’s a special relationship between male chimpanzees and their offspring is one of the questions that the field data in the archive may answer, she said. “Who knows what we’re going to find analyzing 50 years of data.”

Little Mama is an example of how old chimpanzees can get. Born in 1938, the chimpanzee is just four years younger than Goodall and the oldest chimpanzee living in a zoo. The two have known each other for about 30 years and Goodall still visits Little Mama at the Lion Country Safari near West Palm Beach.

It’s usually easy to find Little Mama, Goodall said. She likes to wear a piece of cloth over her head.

To keep audience members from feeling like hugging the next best chimpanzee, Goodall also had a story about violent gang war between two groups of chimpanzees that used to be one. Males of one group didn’t rest until they had killed the males of the other group, she said, and compared the situation to the American Civil War.

Considering how dangerous male chimpanzees can be makes the story of Jojo particularly stunning. Goodall frequently ends her talks with this story and did so at Duke.

An essay Goodall wrote for Science in 1998 included this version of the Jojo story:

One of the unexpected rewards that I have found as I become increasingly involved in conservation and animal welfare issues, has been meeting so many dedicated, caring, and understanding people. I cannot close this without sharing a story that, for me, has a truly symbolic meaning. The hero in this story is a human being named Rick Swope who visits the Detroit zoo once a year with his family.

One day, as he watched the chimpanzees in their big new enclosure, a fight broke out between two adult males. Jojo, who had been at the zoo for years, was challenged by a younger and stronger newcomer, and Jojo lost. In his fear he fled into the moat which was brand new, and Jojo did not understand water. He had gotten over the barrier erected to prevent the chimpanzees from falling in—for they cannot swim—and the group of visitors and staff that happened to be there watched in horror as Jojo began to drown. He went under once, twice, three times. Rick Swope could bear it no longer. He jumped in to try to save the chimp, despite onlookers yelling at him about the danger. He managed to get Jojo’s dead weight over his shoulder, and then crossed the barrier and pushed Jojo onto the bank of the island.

Rick held him there—the bank was very steep and if he were to let go Jojo would slide back into the water—even when the other chimps charged toward him, screaming in excitement. Rick held Jojo until he raised his head, took a few staggering steps, and collapsed on more level ground.

The director of the institute called Rick. “That was a brave thing you did. You must have known how dangerous it was. What made you do it?”

“Well, I looked into his eyes. And it was like looking into the eyes of a man. And the message was, ‘Won’t anybody help me?’”

Another visitor at the Detroit Zoo caught the rescue on videotape. Here’s the TV news report with footage of the rescue: