Published by Greystone Books, Fall 2000
"This is not only a beautiful book, but an important one. It highlights the intelligence and human-like qualities of the great apes and at the same time points to their desperate need for our help if they are to survive into the future."
Jane Goodall, Ph.D.
"With an informative text and evocative photographs, The Nature of Great Apes provides a fine overview of the natural history of these magnificent creatures, our closest kin."
George Schaller, Director of Science, Wildlife Conservation Society
With expressive faces, communicative hoots and calls, and complex social groupings, great apes are among the animal kingdom’s most intriguing creatures. The Nature of Great Apes reveals, in an engaging text with stunning full-color photographs, the intelligence, the vulnerability, and the charisma of our four closest relatives: orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos.
Great apes live in the rain forests of Borneo and Sumatra and across parts of tropical Africa. They spend half their waking hours foraging for assorted leafy plants and other edibles, and the remaining time resting, traveling, or socializing. Orangutans are the loners of the ape world; often males and females meet only to mate--and females may be receptive once every six or seven years. Gorillas live in tightly knit families led by a patriarch that staunchly defends his females and his young. Within their large communities, competitive chimpanzees and social bonobos drift into small, ever-changing parties to find food or gather around a prospective mate.
Biologist Michelle A. Gilders explores not only the evolution, communication and tool use of great apes but their mythology as well-- from the Pygmy legend of the man who stole fire from chimpanzees to silver screen classics such as King Kong and Planet of the Apes. Gilders also describes the many threats facing apes and their habitat, including logging, poaching and the live-animal trade.
Over forty dramatic full-color photographs include stunning close-ups of a tender bonobo mother and her delicate newborn offspring, intimate portraits of mating mountain gorillas, the sullen pouting of an anxious chimpanzee, and playful images of a leaf-capped orangutan shading itself from the midday sun. These photos, by turns poignant, disturbing, and funny, illuminate a concise, interesting text that both educates and entertains.
Text Excerpt From Chapter 1...
Dawn in the high mountain rain forests comes slowly. Rain clouds darken the sky, shrouding the mountain in mist and hiding the emerging sun. Gradually, as the light filters through definition comes to the forest. Everything is muted here, damp, soft. A thousand shades of green, layer upon layer of verdant life. There are movements on the forest floor, slight stirrings of life, as the inhabitants rise. The mountain gorillas wake slowly. They call softly to those that are out of sight. They will spend the day eating and resting. Youngsters play-fight, testing their strength, cupping their hands and beating on their small chests, pok-pok, under the ever-watchful eye of the commanding silverback. Rain falls often, and the apes sit stoically, their arms folded against the cold, as rain drips from their long black coats.
Most people have never met their closest relatives--that is their closest animal relatives. Orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos (also known as pygmy chimpanzees), and humans are all great apes. Many people would rather forget the piercing eyes and familiar faces of the other apes that are the all-too-similar mirrors to our own. But there is no escaping our genes.
Through the pioneering work of such biologists as Dian Fossey and George Schaller (mountain gorillas), Jane Goodall (chimpanzees), Takayoshi Kano (bonobos), and Biruté Galdikas (orangutans), we now have a better understanding of our closest animal relatives. With many of the apes threatened with extinction, such insights will be crucial to their survival.
Text Excerpt From Chapter 2...
Imagine a world in which finding enough suitable food, escaping predators, avoiding or eliminating parasites, dealing with bad weather, finding a mate, and raising offspring to adulthood were everyday concerns. This is the world faced by animals around the globe. Many animals solve these problems alone. They forage alone, deal with predators alone, and unite with a mate only when it is time to breed. Others band together in groups. Group living may simply involve a herd of animals traveling together, taking advantage of greater numbers to reduce the risk of predation, or it may involve extended families where animals cooperate within a more complex society. Among the great apes evolution has borne both loners and society-dwellers.
Great apes usually live within defined residential ranges that vary in size. Female orangutans may range over less than one square kilometer (0.4 square miles) whereas gorilla, bonobo or forest-dwelling chimpanzee groups may occupy more than 40 square kilometers (16 square miles). In the savanna, chimpanzees often roam over territories of more than 500 square kilometers (200 square miles). The size of an animals’ range is determined by the type of habitat, the amount of available food, the number of breedable mates, and the intensity of competition with apes from neighboring territories.
Within most ranges, males dominate females (the exception being bonobos), and within the established social hierarchy, males, and sometimes females, compete with each other for food and mates. Dominant males can lead a group for many years. Under this system, the dominant male fathers the majority of the group’s offspring, and so in many ape societies female choice of a mate has evolved to reduce inbreeding. Among the African apes, most females transfer from their birth group into a new family before they breed for the first time.
The great apes are tropical animals and their daily lives are dictated by the diurnal cycle that splits the day into equal parts light and dark. For most, the day begins at dawn, 0630. As much as half the day may be spent foraging. Early morning feeding is often interrupted by a period of midday rest, to be followed by more foraging in the afternoon, and perhaps some traveling to a new foraging area. In the early evening the apes build nests from branches and leaves, breaking sticks and padding their nests with soft leaves and moss. Dependent youngsters sleep in their mothers’ nest, while those who are weaned learn by imitation and practice how to build their own. A new nest is constructed every night, and apes retire as dusk plunges the forest into darkness.
© 2000 michelle@michellegilders.com
Get your own Free Home Page