Chimpanzee

There is more than one villain in the book, but there's a main henchman who needs to be colourful and a bit odd.

In the book, there's a guy called The Chimp.

He's done a lot of kind of physical remodelling with tattoos and plastic surgery.

He's trying to look like a demon, but everybody thinks he looks like a chimpanzee.

Temp

Resort? Chimpanzee.

Oh, Chimp Resort.

The Temp Resort.

It will become overwhelming to a human.

Chimpanzee, we talked about that.

Chimp, strongly favored to win.

Strongly? Fight to his death.

Many sources questioned the legitimacy, obviously because it was stupid.

You've been promoting a website, wavyschimp.com or something.

Wavy versus chimp.com.

The site was peddling cryptocurrency and is now completely offline.

Now, when I say this story is familiar, I don't just mean familiar to us as human beings.

After all, a similar story has long played out among our closest cousins, the chimpanzees.

My guest today is Dr. Rachna Reddy.

Rachna co-directs the longstanding Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Uganda and is an incoming assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

For more than a decade now, she has been closely observing the chimpanzees at Ngogo, and especially the adolescents.

Here, Rachna and I talk about why adolescence, in all its intensity, is such a scientifically fascinating life stage.

We sketch the Ngogo research site, home to the largest group of chimpanzees ever studied.

We unpack the different stages of chimpanzee life history.

So that's, that's what led me to Gombe.

And I mean, what aspects of chimpanzee behavior and how ecology specifically impacts their behavior influences their behavior? Are you most interested in?

So I'm interested in many different aspects of their behavior.

But what I've focused on in my research at Gombe has been aggression and the things that cause chimpanzees to behave violently towards each other, both within groups and between groups.

And so they answered those kind of detailed questionnaires and then Alex performed some fancy statistics to try to capture different personality dimensions and Overall, that project led to finding that some of the personality traits that had been documented in captive chimpanzees are also present.

and wild chimpanzees, and they vary a lot.

And we've worked with our colleague Joseph Feldblum at Duke University to see if those personality traits relate to anything else that we can quantify, to see if these are these really accurate reflections of chimpanzee behavior, and do they matter in real life, and what what we found was that there is a positive correlation between the personality trait of dominant with reproductive success.

And this is a personality trait that scored independently of knowing their dominance ranks.

What if the monkey wins? Then you'd be all for it, wouldn't you?

Well, experts have warned that this match is a disaster waiting to happen.

Chimpanzees are usually remarkably tolerant of humans, but, uh, they warn that no amount of fighting skill will save Mr. Johnson from a catastrophic injury.

[laughs]

Besides the obvious animal cruelty and conservation concerns-

Oh, yeah, 'cause they'll eat your face.

I don't know if MMA fighters generally, uh, eat your face, but a monkey will.

Chimpanzees are extremely powerful animals with substantially greater upper body strength and dynamic muscle performance than humans.

If it's a chimpanzee, it's like a baby chimpanzee.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Chimpanzee is a different

species.

I thought the chimpanzee was the baby orangutan.

seen Chimp Crazy?

Of course I've seen Chimpanzee.

Oh, my God.

I'm obsessed with that woman.