![]() ![]() Carbon stable isotopes are commonly used to reconstruct dietary ecology and habitat use of living and extinct primates. The scientists also combined their plant food mechanical data with data from a stable isotope analysis from both plant and chimpanzee hair samples. “I was surprised to see that some values even exceed those recorded for orangutan foods as they are generally considered to consume the most mechanically challenging diet of all the great apes,” says van Casteren. Using a portable mechanical tester, he measured the physical properties of plant tissues and found that some plant parts from the mosaic savannah woodland habitat, such as the outer casing of the Strychnos fruit, had much higher toughness and stiffness values than the plant tissues he tested from the rainforest. Adam van Casteren of the Max Planck Weizmann Center for Integrative Archaeology and Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology went out to compare the material properties of various plant foods eaten by chimpanzees in a tropical rainforest (Ngogo, Uganda) and a savannah woodland (Issa Valley, Tanzania). The mechanical properties of plant foods can vary substantially but to date there were no comparative data available for chimpanzee populations living in distinct habitat types. ![]() Savannah chimpanzees are thought to rely on these non-fruit resources more than their forest counterparts. ![]() Chimpanzees are generally known as the ripe fruit specialist among the great apes but also incorporate other food items such as leaves and seedpods into their diets. ![]()
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