The Next Generation's Champion of Chimps | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

So it's just two of us, and then there were the marijuana growers who had automatic weapons with them. We stumbled upon them in the forest, and they saw us too. This is the hot, humid forest of southwestern Nigeria. It's a tropical jungle teeming with life. There are these 50-foot trees stretching for sunlight and scaly pangolins—sort of imagine a possum trying very hard to be a pine cone—and elusive chimpanzees.

Rachel Ashabafa, a Nigerian chimpanzee researcher, was out with a team member looking for signs of chimpanzees when she found herself face to face with a drug cartel. They were like, "Who are you? Where are you coming from? Where are you going to?" You know, and there are guns flashing in front of us. Rachel was in trouble. Marijuana is illegal in Nigeria, and so is farming in protected forests. Rachel is the project director for a forest conservation group and sometimes comes to uproot farms like this one. But usually, she's prepared with motorcycles, guns, and lots of backup.

But if these men knew who she really was, they might not let her and her colleague leave. They were on them; we couldn't challenge them. So I used the other weapon which is natural to me, or to any woman, so I played that female card like, "Oh, it's a woman researcher, student, who is going into the forest looking for monkeys. Have you seen any monkeys lately?"

So yeah, that was like a strategy to avoid being killed. The strategy paid off. For a typical Nigerian, an average Nigerian man, it's unthinkable that a woman, an educated woman, would go into the forest. So of course, in his mind, he's thinking that, yeah, she must be right—that she's just a student—because it doesn't make any sense that a woman is doing what I'm doing. But under all that pressure, in the back of her mind, Rachel was already thinking of coming back to reclaim this small patch of forest right there.

My GPS is on; it's taking a sticking record of that particular position. Then we use the GPS coordinates from that particular location to trace them back later this time around to get them arrested and destroy their farms and campsites. This forest that Rachel watches over is one of the last strongholds of a unique group of chimpanzees that could become extinct in just a few years.

[Music] I'm Amy Briggs, executive editor of National Geographic History Magazine, and this is Overheard—a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here at Nachio and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. This week, we meet a trio of women dedicated to learning all we can about Africa's chimpanzees. It's been 60 years since Jane Goodall did her pioneering research, and since then, new generations of conservationists are stepping up to protect Africa's most endangered chimps. Today, more after this.

I'd like to play you a little clip from a National Geographic documentary released way back—well, not that way back for some of us—in 1984, among the wild chimpanzees. For centuries, there were fearsome tales of a half-human monster roaming the African forests. Even in modern times, knowledge of the elusive creature, the wild chimpanzee, was largely based on speculation. Then in 1960, a daring young English woman set out to sort fiction from truth.

It's probably not too hard to guess whom this documentary is about. Her name is Jane Goodall. She was 26 years old and destined to make scientific history. Jane Goodall had been hired to go on this expedition in what is now Tanzania by an anthropologist named Louis Leakey. He thought observing great apes could help us understand how ancient humans lived—especially chimpanzees because they are so similar to humans. They are tied with bonobos as our closest living genetic relatives.

Jane spent months watching the chimpanzees and slowly introducing them to her presence. "I discovered not far from camp that there was a peak overlooking two valleys, and from this vantage point, I was able to gradually piece together the daily behavior of the chimps." Eventually, she was able to watch them close up and pioneered the study of chimpanzees in their natural habitat.

"The chimps very gradually came to realize that I was not dangerous after all. I shall never forget the day, after about 18 months, when for the first time a small group allowed me to approach and be near them. Finally, I had been accepted. I think it was one of the proudest and most exciting moments of my whole life." Goodall made all kinds of incredible discoveries about chimpanzees like they make tools to hunt termites, and kind of like birds, they build complicated nests to sleep high up in the trees.

And they seem to have their own set of chimp etiquette and could be kind or cruel to each other. Jane stayed at that spot, now Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. She was there for decades and set the groundwork for chimpanzee research to this day. But there was still a lot left to learn. Jane Goodall's research started in central Africa, but there are other groups of chimpanzees who live all across the continent. Some have been isolated from each other for hundreds of thousands of years. Studying those apes would fall to more recent generations of primatologists.

So what was it like for you when you first saw a chimpanzee in the wild?

"Oh, well, so that's a very good story actually. It's a story I get made fun of a lot for, but I'll tell you anyway."

Okay, what happened? This is Katie Gander, head of the biology department at Drexel University. She started studying chimpanzees in the 90s.

"When I first went to Nigeria, chimpanzees were believed to be extinct in Nigeria. Jane Goodall wrote in her 1986 book, 'The Chimpanzees of Gombe,' that apes were extinct in Nigeria, and that's what most Western biologists believed at the time. I didn't even believe that there were still chimpanzees, and my PhD advisor John Oates was like, 'No, no, they're still there, look!' So we tracked them for three days and we found them, and it was such a powerful experience."

People in Nigeria knew the chimps were there and how to find them. So I was with this gentleman named Salamu, who knew everything about animals, and I was in my first year of graduate school. I told Salimu, "Look, Salamu, I'm a professional primatologist. I will go up to them and get a picture; you stay back here."

It was a big moment for Katie on the cusp of taking a picture of an animal that was supposed to be extinct.

"So I snuck up on these chimpanzees. I had my camera in my pouch and everything. So he snuck up and snuck up and took, like, I don't know, 45 minutes or an hour. I finally got right up underneath them, and I was like, this is it." I took my Velcro thing, and I went and grabbed my camera, and all of a sudden, the chimpanzees were like—they started throwing stuff at me.

And so all I have is this picture of my eye and blurry vegetation as I saw. And Salimu laughed and laughed and laughed. So, but it was such a powerful experience. It really was. I mean, there's just nothing like seeing wild apes. But for many years after that, every time I would go back to Gashaka Gumti, Salimu would say, "Ah, here comes the professional primatologist!"

So yeah, I ate a little bit of humble pie for many years after that. Despite the humble pie, Katie continued to go back and gathered more evidence—pictures, fur, and fecal samples. Katie was able to extract DNA to compare these chimpanzees with other known groups of chimps.

"When we did that, what we found was that they were very, very different from any other chimpanzees around." So in 1997, Katie proposed that this group of chimpanzees be considered its own subspecies.

Now a subspecies is kind of what it sounds like—different but not different enough to be its own separate species. Take, for instance, Siberian tigers in Russia and Sumatran tigers in Indonesia. They're both still tigers, but evolving in these two different places gives them different traits from visible things like size and coat to differences at the genetic level. Same principles apply for chimps.

For example, the chimpanzee subspecies Katie observed doesn't seem vulnerable to the simian version of HIV like the chimps of Central and East Africa. Before Katie wrote her paper, the local people already had a sense that there were different kinds of chimpanzees living in the area, and they said this all the time.

They said, "You know, there's two different kinds of chimpanzees here." And for years, I was like, "Oh yeah, right." But in fact now we have all this camera trap data, so they're literally—we're really telling the truth. But they were saying, "Well, there's ones that are light brown and ones that are really dark," and that's what they meant.

Some species also develop different technologies based on where they live. Each chimp group passes down different generational knowledge to their kids, like how to use tools to hunt for food and crack open nuts found in the region. If the subspecies goes extinct, so does all their particular chimpanzee culture and biology.

Katie says that extinction could deeply impact all the other living things in the forest that depend on the chimps.

"Usually when those animals are lost, it's a sign that the ecosystems are not healthy anymore. And they play a really important role in the forest. Like chimpanzee poop is very important, not just for my genetic studies, but also really important for just chimpanzees. They eat fruits, and then they disperse seeds, and they're—you know, they're basically the farmers of the forest, and that's really quite an important role."

There are four known subspecies of chimps. The one that Katie observed is now known as the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee. It is the rarest subspecies, and one of the places their numbers are threatened the most is in western Nigeria, where only a few small pockets of them survive.

"Do you think that there's hope for the survival of chimps in western Nigeria?"

"I do, but you know it will require constant surveillance in order for them to survive. There are very, very few of them left. I know firsthand how hard it is."

Several years ago, I went to a place called Ishay Forest in Nigeria, and we found the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee. Katie went to western Nigeria to find DNA samples; she spent six months looking without seeing a single chimpanzee.

So she hired a group of hunters to help track them, and together they spotted a group of chimps at the edge of a destroyed marijuana farm, and I thought, "My goodness, I have found them, but I probably just sentenced them to death."

Now these hunters know where they are, and so I just made the decision to never go look for them again. It just wasn't worth it. Ishay Forest is where Rachel Ashabafa works.

So how long do you think this particular group of chimps would last without conservation, without these efforts?

"We estimated no more than five years. Like, I don't think five years is an overestimate." Rachel grew up in Nigeria. Her first jobs were in forest conservation. But when she found out about the small pockets of chimpanzees in danger of extinction, she felt like she had to help them.

"I really was really concerned that if I didn't step in or intervene, they could as well say goodbye to this population of chimpanzees surviving in southwest Nigeria and in the Niger Delta." Rachel has been studying the chimpanzees in southwestern Nigeria for about eight years. She estimates that there are only about 25 chimps living in her protected area, and they're not easy to observe.

"So chimpanzees in this part of the country where I'm working are very, very shy—as in very wary of humans." One reason Jane Goodall was able to learn so much about chimpanzees was that she spent years slowly showing a few of them that she and her team weren't dangerous. But in Ishay, chimpanzees have learned that humans are dangerous, and because the chimps keep their distance, Rachel and her colleagues almost never see them.

So instead, she studies them by listening. And when chimpanzees are excited, they really find it hard to hold it in. So yes, they'll make that kind of sound, you know, they would scream loud.

"Like, this is like a festival, like this is a feast."

And she studies them by getting her hands dirty—by collecting their poop.

"This might be a little gross, but how do you know if the poop comes from a chimpanzee?"

"I mean, it's a very interesting question, and I'm going to tell you this story because it's square so funny how this happened. So this was a few years ago, and at that time, collecting chimp poop was so important because one of the objectives of the work we're doing at the time was to determine their genetic linkage. So I was so desperate to get chimp poop."

Rachel explained how she and a small group had spent a week in the forest searching for a poop sample without success until the very last day of their trip. They woke up at 5 AM hoping to hear a chimp call and track it to its nest.

"We had the sound, and I was so happy, I was like, this is it. Today we're going to get chimp poop." They had a good idea of what direction the nests were in, but finding them wasn't easy.

"And we didn't see a single nest. I got so depressed. We just walked forward a bit, and then I stopped. And I was like, I smell something. Stop here; I smell something." And we started to search the ground everywhere, and bowler, we saw chimp poop.

You know how did I know it was chimp? Number one: instinct. Number two: they smell almost like human poop.

"I'm so glad you offered that up because I didn't want to ask."

"It smells really bad!"

"But guess what? I just didn't care. I was just happy seeing them at that point. I was just so happy to see poop."

Like Katie Gander, Rachel is also looking for genetic samples to show that this group is unique—maybe even unique enough to be considered its own subspecies, separate from the chimps Katie observed in other parts of Nigeria.

"So the southwestern chimps have been isolated for a very long time to such an extent that they have built a type of genetic pool that is significantly unique. So the probability that there could be a subspecies is very likely rather than unlikely."

Declaring a new subspecies can lead to more funding and resources to protect the chimps in Ishay Forest. In 2018, Rachel teamed up with genetic researchers at the Copenhagen Zoo and presented a study showing that this group is genetically different from the rest of the subspecies.

"And that has brought us to where we are now, where we discovered that the chimpanzees in southwestern Nigeria, although they are closely related to the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee, they are really quite a unique group."

Whether or not these chimpanzees could be their own subspecies is still up for debate. To find the answer, Rachel needs more data, and that means more poop. It took 10 years for the Nigeria-Cameroon subspecies to be widely accepted, but the chimps in western Nigeria might not have that much time.

Nigeria as a whole will be up against some pretty big hurdles for conservation in the next few decades. By 2050, the UN estimates that Nigeria will have the third-largest human population in the entire world, after China and India.

Nigeria's growing population needs work and food, so new farms and towns are driving rapid deforestation there.

"I don't know if you get the picture; it's that bad. Like, you walked in an area that used to be forest, you observed say, for example, elephants in that area or you had chimps in that area, and then go back the following year and found that place is no more forest; it's people living there now—like a township, like a rural township—it's now in place of where it used to be forest where elephants used to work."

A big part of Rachel's job is convincing the local community that the forest is worth saving.

"And it sounds like so much of your work, too, is in working with that other group of great apes, you know, Homo sapiens—human beings."

"Yes, what is their role in conservation, and like, what are their reactions?"

"It's been a lot of work. In the beginning, they were very, very opposed to any conservation—any suggestion for conservation—because really, you can't blame them. The forest is where many of them get their means of livelihood from. But many of them are beginning to see that conserving this forest is equivalent to conserving our lives as well."

Part of this work is finding new jobs for people who used to work as hunters or loggers and giving them a role in protecting the forest and the chimps who live there.

"This is a group of new ranger trainees hired by Rachel; they're heading out on their first mission to shut down an illegal farm. So this is the season when they do cultivate marijuana, so we've got our hands full."

The trainees are able to quietly arrest the farmers. They tie them together around the waist with a long rope—like beads on a string.

[Music] Then they destroy the crops and burn the campsite.

"We took them to the community, and when the community saw that we arrested these people, you know, their attitude towards us changed like a tradition. Like, you guys are great! You guys are fantastic! Wow, now we see the reason for this conservation area. Like, we are working together; we are here for them—not just for chimpanzees, but we are here for them as well. And we are partners with them, not against them as they initially thought."

Chimp conservation has a long tradition of hands-on work. Jane Goodall did it, Katie Gander does it, and now Rachel is doing it too, bringing more people in the community to the party. Each woman has had to face the unique challenges of their own time and place, adapting their approaches in the face of new threats to chimpanzees.

Rachel still has a long way to go before Ishay and its chimpanzees are secure. It isn't clear whether the forest will survive in the long term, but at least now it has a fighting chance.

There's a lot of truly fascinating information about chimpanzees that we couldn't include in this episode; there just wasn't room. But we've put together a few links for the curious explorer in our show notes, like the research that is still going on today at Gombe Stream National Park into the social lives of chimpanzee mothers, or read about how chimpanzees were declared endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2015, making biomedical research on them illegal.

Now hundreds of those chimpanzees live in sanctuaries across the U.S., and subscribers can dive into the National Geographic online archive to see the many articles written by Jane Goodall. That's all in the show notes—you can find them there in your podcast app. And while you're there, be sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. It really helps other listeners find us. Overheard at National Geographic is produced by Brian Gutierrez, Jacob Pinter, Laura Sim, and Alana Strauss.

Our senior editor is Eli Chen, our senior producer is Carla Wills, our executive producer of audio is Devara Ardellon, our fact-checkers are Robin Palmer and Julie Beer, our copy editor is Amy Kolczak. Hansdale Su designed this episode and composed our theme music. This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners. The National Geographic Society committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world funds the work of National Geographic explorer Rachel Ashabafa.

Whitney Johnson is the director of visuals and immersive experiences. Susan Goldberg is National Geographic's editorial director, and I'm your host, Amy Briggs. Thanks for listening, and see you all next time.

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