248 Appendices
(^99) Where no month is entered, this means the item has been seen eaten but the date was not recorded or
has been lost.
(^100) We are greatly indebted to Linda Vigilant and the Leipzig team, and to Christophe Boesch who originally
offered to genotype our samples there.
(^101) For details of the method, which has since been refined, see Morin et al. (2001). Figure 4 in that paper is
especially useful in outlining the method used. For recent refinements, see Vigilant (2002), Bradley and
Vigilant (2002), Thalmann et al. (2004) and Nsubuga et al. (2004).
Chimpanzees were seen to eat parts of the following kinds of plants: trees, shrubs, herbs, climbers
and epiphytes. They fed on the following plant parts: fruits, leaves, flowers, bark, seeds, stem/pith, gum
and wood. Of these, ripe fruits and young leaves made up the bulk of the Sonso diet.
Several studies have been made under the auspices of the BFP of the foods eaten and the feeding
behaviour of the Sonso chimpanzees (see Chapter 4). Here, for completeness and for comparisons with
other sites, I include an alphabetical list of the plant food species we have seen the Sonso chimpanzees
eat (Table B.1). The key to the table is at the end. Besides species name, the table includes type of plant,
part of plant eaten and the months in which we have recorded the species being eaten.^99 The final
column indicates how many months each species is eaten and therefore to some extent how important
it is in the diet. This table does not include non-plant foods such as meat, insects and soil, and it does
not include cultivars obtained wheni crop-raiding.
I have used the work of those mentioned above, revised by Zephyr Kiwede, Geresomu Muhumuza,
and also Newton-Fisher (1997), Fawcett (2000) and Tweheyo et al. (2004). I am most grateful to these
people and to others who have contributed to this project.
C Genetics of the Sonso community
With the advent of non-invasive methods of obtaining DNA, we can now genotype individual
chimpanzees without needing to take blood from them. DNA can be obtained from hair samples (the
hair follicle contains DNA), wadges (a wadge is a bolus of rejected food, e.g. fig seeds or rattan fibres,
that is formed in the mouth and spat out; DNA is present in the oral mucus in and around the wadge)
and faeces (which contain DNA from the anal mucus they receive during defecation).
Our genetic studies on the Sonso chimpanzees are still in progress. Studies of relatedness and of
paternity are being done by Linda Vigilant, Dieter Lukas and her team at the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.^100
Since 2000 we have been collecting samples (hairs and wadges initially, latterly faeces) for analysis
of microsatellite sequences of nuclear DNA which give information on maternal and paternal related-
ness. The analysis, which is painstaking, slow, and can lead to false conclusions unless the greatest care
is taken at both the stage of laboratory analysis and interpretation,^101 has enabled us to make advances
in two areas: the extent of relatedness of our males compared with that of females, and relationships of
kinship in the community.
It is generally assumed that the degree of relatedness of the males of any chimpanzee community will
be greater than that of its females. The reason is that whereas the males stay put in their home range and
do not emigrate, females very often do emigrate at adolescence. Thus what we see in any community is
a succession of females entering the community and leaving it, whereas the males do not leave, they
remain in the community until they die. Thus it seems obvious that the males in a community will be
more closely related to each other than the females are to each other. The males will be related as fathers