Save a Bonobo, Save an Elephant

Bonobos are astonishing primates. Sister species to chimpanzees, the two species live side-by-side in the Congo River Basin, where scientist Gay Edwards Reinartz also lives and works. Reinartz shared her bonobo experiences at the recent Wildlife Conservation Expo. Compared to chimpanzees, bonobos are narrower, darker, and have longer arms. They’re also much more peaceful—likely because of sex. There’s a lot of sex in bonobo society, between all sorts of partners (insert joke about San Francisco lifestyle similarities here). Sex dissipates social tension, Reinartz says.

But bonobos are in trouble in the Congo. Logging, civil unrest, human hunting, and overall population growth are all eating away at the bonobos’ habitat, Reinartz explains. Only about 20,000-30,000 of the peaceful bonobos remain in the wild. So the job of Reinartz and her colleagues is to find and protect bonobo populations in Salonga National Park. The park is three to four times larger than Yellowstone, and when Reinartz first arrived in 2001, it was uncharted—maps were useless.

But poachers seemed to know the park quite well: Reinartz and her team found a disturbing number of hunting snares and permanent hunting camps. “It was a free-for-all,” she says. Not surprisingly, ivory poachers looking for forest elephants were the biggest threats. (We wrote about the African elephants’ decline in our very first Wildlife Wednesday post.) The poachers threatened the lives of park guards and local communities alike.

In the quest to reclaim Salanga as a protected area, Reinartz says, they started with ten guards on the river, providing uniforms, training, fuel, and machetes to cover about 2,000 kilometers of the park. And they’ve increased their efforts since then. In 2011, they quadrupled patrols, enabling the guards to do a very large sweep of the park. With the added protection, the park has seen a three-fold increase in elephant activity and a ten-fold decrease in poaching. This year alone, the guards have confiscated 150 snares and made 24 poaching-related arrests.

The good news extends to the bonobos, too, Reinartz says—and it’s spreading to nearby villages. Her organization has also built schools for the guards and their families, funding teachers, books, and literacy programs. The communities are becoming the bonobos’, the elephants’, and the Salonga ecosystems’ greatest allies.

Image: LaggedOnUser /Flickr