Lincoln Park Zoo

Year after year populations of wild apes disappear across Africa due to increased habitat fragmentation, the commercial bushmeat trade and disease. One or all of these problems may threaten a given population. Lincoln Park Zoo scientists work with various partners on projects throughout Africa to help conserve wild apes. The zoo also supports young African scientists who lead conservation projects for chimpanzees, lowland gorillas and mountain gorillas. This helps groom a new generation of researchers as environmental decision-makers and strengthens conservation leadership in the countries where great apes live.

Gombe Field Research
The site of Dr. Jane Goodall’s groundbreaking research, Tanzania’s Gombe National Park has changed our understanding of animals and altered our perception of what it means to be human. Since 1960, Goodall and her peers have observed generations of the area’s chimpanzees. The behaviors they recorded—chimpanzees making and using tools, hunting prey and even waging warfare—exceeded the boundaries of what was previously thought possible, capturing worldwide attention and galvanizing global conservation efforts.

Today, Lincoln Park Zoo is proud to partner with the Jane Goodall Institute on a number of research projects in Gombe National Park. Zoo scientists take advantage of the resources that have been established over nearly half a century to study chimpanzee health, chimpanzee play and the mother-infant relationship in the species. The answers our scientists find through this partnership will be integral to learning more about chimpanzees and, ultimately, ourselves. Click here to learn more

Goualougo Triangle Ape Project
The main goals of the Goualougo Triangle Ape Project are to enhance our knowledge of the central subspecies of chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) and improve their conservation status throughout central Africa. A long-term site-based conservation and research program is in place to document the social structure and ecology of this ape population, monitori the densities of chimpanzees and gorillas in the Goualougo Triangle, improve survey methods to estimate ape abundance in the region and document the effect of timber exploitation on chimpanzees residing in an active logging concession. For more information visit www.congo-apes.org

Chimpanzee Mother-Infant Relationships
In most mammals, including humans, the mother-offspring relationship is critical to how offspring survive and reproduce later in life. Despite the insights chimpanzees can provide into humans, relatively little is known about what influences chimpanzee maternal behavior and how that behavior translates to offspring health and development.

One factor that may be crucial is maternal stress levels, and so our current research aims to identify what stresses female chimpanzees and to relate maternal stress to maternal behavior, and ultimately, offspring stress, health, and development. Since 1970, researchers at Gombe National Park in Tanzania have been collecting data on maternal and infant behavior. These data currently include more than 15,000 hours of observations on 39 different mothers, making the Gombe mother-infant dataset the largest and most detailed primate-behavioral-development database in the world.

In addition, health data have been collected since 2004 under the direction of Elizabeth Lonsdorf, Ph.D., and Dominic Travis, Ph.D. Endocrinologist Rachel Santymire, Ph.D., has also developed techniques for collecting and analyzing fecal samples for stress hormones. This collaborative, multidisciplinary project will allow us to fully investigate the relationship between maternal stress, offspring stress and health.