Kalunde, the guest, and the safari ants

By Lazaro George - Guide, Greystoke Mahale

Safari ants are social insects that live in big colonies. Their social structure is made up of a queen, a king, soldiers and workers. In the rainy season there are plenty of these ants around and you can see them walking in big files along cleared trails on the forest floor.  These ants, cute as they are, they inflict nasty bites if they crawl onto your body especially to the soft parts. 

Safari ants basically communicate by pheromone, a chemical secretion which upon being released by one member - potentially a soldier - is picked up by all the other ants and in just a fraction of seconds they all start biting, following the lead of the first ant to bite. Their biting is so painful that no one can bear it; a victim could do anything to get rid of them.

On one of the days recently out there in the forest tracking chimpanzees, we happened to stand on the safari  ant’s trail unknowingly, following a marvelous chimp viewing we were having at that particular moment. We knew we were on the ant’s trail when one of my clients started to jump while poking his hand in his trouser and shirt. We all got alert, and started to look around. Right where we stood was a safari ant’s trail, and the line was disrupted and dozens and dozens of safari ants were raising their heads up with the pincers widely opened. We had to leap away but some ants had already crawled on us.

My one client, after getting severe bites from the ants, couldn’t bear it any longer and he decided to take off his trousers. To us it wasn’t amusing as it was a normal reaction that someone could end up resorting to when he has such a nasty insect on him. But Kalunde, the oldest male in the habituated M-community, had a surprising reaction as he seemed to be amused at seeing someone taking off his trousers. Kalunde and the other chimpanzees, they probably have never had such an experience of seeing people half naked. Therefore seeing that was a bit of a surprise to him, we thought. After all the ants had been reomoved the guy got dressed and Kalunde got back to his normal staring stance. 

Who's the Father?

By Kakae Saiteu - Guide, Greystoke Mahale
 
Recently, on a normal day tracking chimpanzees, we found quite an impressive social interaction between Orion, an adult male and Tani’s 2 year old female infant. The interaction was impressive as Orion was trying to win over Tani’s baby, who was sitting by her mother’s belly, to come and join him to play. It is a rare phenomenon to see this kind of interaction between adult males and infants. It is a more common interaction between juveniles or infants.

On that date Orion was pursuing Tani’s baby to play with him by looking straight to her, flamboyantly swinging and moving his body in a playful manner.  He even physically pulled the baby away from her mother. Following Orion’s persistence, the infant eventually went to join him. Orion took the baby by her hand, cuddled her and the two engaged in a playful moment.  He kept on tickling her, gently grooming and pretending as if he was biting her and kept performing all sorts of different playful gestures. They did that for sometime before the group started to walk away from where they had been resting.  After witnessing this scene, we were all curious to know whether Orion was the father of the baby - especially because of the way he was treating the baby with great care.
 
That friendly interaction between Orion and the baby raised some questions and speculations;  some thought Orion is the father as he treated the baby nicely, while others thought it could have been a coincidence that Orion wanted an infant to play with and it happened to be Tani’s baby who was nearby. To answer this question we certainly would need a DNA test, which is not possible to do.
 
We explored the possibilities of Orion being the father by referring to other sites where chimpanzee research has been going on where DNA tests were conducted to determine paternity among infants, like Tai forest in Ivory Coast, The DNA test results show that those infants who were found playing and accompanying certain males more often than others, were with their fathers. That could be the same case for Orion and the baby. However, that still cannot be a definite conclusion as the sample size considered for the testing was small and it could still be a pure coincidence that the infants were with males that fathered them at a time when sampling for DNA tests was conducted.