Chimpanzee Behavior in the Wild: An Audio-Visual Encyclopedia

Product Description Where We Stand Field workers―scientists of animal (including human!) behavior in nature―have long been fascinated by wild chimpanzees. A person who once has studied wild chimpanzees will be eager to observe them again. A person who has studied them twice will make every effort to continue the study, unless prevented from doing so. In short, behavioral primatology is addictive! Many people, among them Jane Goodall, Richard Wrangham, and I, do not regret that they have dedicated their whole lives to the study of wild chimpanzees. This is because the apes’ behavior is always challenging: chimpanzees are cheerful, charming, playful, curious, beautiful, easygoing, generous, tolerant, and trustw- thy most of the time, but also are cautious, cunning, ugly, violent, ferocious, blo- thirsty, greedy, and disloyal at other times. We human beings share both the light and dark sides with our closest living relatives. For decades, we have documented huge across-population variation in behavior, as well as within-population variation. Cultural biology (now called cultural pri- tology), as proposed 60 years ago by Kinji Imanishi, recently has flourished. Review From the reviews:“The Audio-Visual Encyclopedia is a concept created by Toshisada Nishida and his colleagues with the objective of providing video footage for ‘an exhaustive listing of behavioral patterns’. … The ambitious format that he and his colleagues have pioneered in Chimpanzee Behavior in the Wild will be enormously stimulating to researchers on chimpanzees, students of primate behavior in general, and theorists about human evolution, and it provides a resource for teaching that no primatologist will want to miss.”­­­ (Richard Wrangham, Primates, Vol. 52, 2011)“This book is the first systematic attempt to comprehensively describe chimpanzee behaviour and document it by use of audio-visual material … . this volume has to be very strongly recommended to anyone interested in chimpanzee behaviour. This book is a landmark in documenting what we know about the chimpanzee ethogram to date, and will be of considerable use to not only chimpologists, but all primatologists, animal behaviourists, anthropologists, zoo-keepers, teachers, students, and perhaps inform those working on the next Planet of the Apes sequel too!” (Anna Roberts, Primate Eye, February, 2012)