Missing Shades of Grue

A particularly cunning seven-year-old chimp named Ayumu has bested university students at a game of memory. He and two other young chimps recalled the placement of numbers flashed onto a computer screen faster and more accurately than humans.

"It's a very simple fact: chimpanzees are better than us -- at this task," says Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a primatologist at Kyoto University in Japan who led the study.

The work doesn't mean that chimps are 'smarter' than humans, but rather they seem to be better at memorizing a snapshot view of their surroundings ? whether that be numbers on a screen or ripe figs dangling from a tree. Humans may have lost this capacity in exchange for gaining the brainpower to understand language and complex symbols, says Matsuzawa.

The local customs that define human cultures in important ways also exist in the ape world, suggests a study reported online June 7th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Indeed, captive chimpanzees, like people, can readily acquire new traditions, and those newly instituted "cultural practices" can spread to other troops.

The Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, is home to seven bonobos -- a close relative of the chimpanzee -- and three orangutans. But if you think Iowa might be a strange place for them to live, don't say it out loud -- these apes understand English.

Chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest primate relatives, but the two apes have very different personalities. While primatologists have often noted nasty, competitive behavior among power-hungry chimps, bonobos have a reputation as free-loving peaceniks. Now, a behavioral study that directly compares the two apes suggests that the bonobos' more cordial nature enables them to cooperate more successfully than chimps in some situations.

... for poor villagers, bonobos can be lucrative business, with much of the meat heading for expensive, clandestine meals at restaurants in the cities.

One bonobo can earn $200 for Richard Ipaka, a 50-year-old part-time poacher who lives in the provincial capital, Mbandaka.

"That's enough money for two months," he said.

Like many Congolese, he said he did not know bonobos are found in the wild only in his country. And like many others, he was skeptical that the ape is endangered.

"Our ancestors have been eating bonobos for centuries. How could they disappear?" Ipaka said.