Over the next few minutes, several more adult chimps entered the area and joined in the ruckus. Another male chimp heard these hoos and barks, as well as UP screaming, and rushed into the area he struck UP before clambering up a tree and starting to produce alarm hoos and waa barks, as well. Later on July 15, a pair of adult chimps encountered UP and the albino infant and began producing "alarm hoos and waa barks," sounds that chimps often make when facing potentially dangerous animals, like snakes and bush pigs, the authors wrote.
Judging by the infant's size and the last recorded sighting of UP, the team estimated that the albino newborn was about 2- to 2-and-a-half weeks old. Now, the new study provides a unique glimpse into the brief life of an albino ape in the wild.Ī 19-year-old female chimp, which the researchers referred to as "UP," was known to be pregnant in January 2018, and on July 15 of that same year, she was seen carrying a "white" infant, later confirmed to be a male. Because Pinkie was collected from the wild at just a few weeks old, scientists didn't have the opportunity to observe her interactions with wild chimps. The only albino chimp ever reported was a western chimpanzee ( Pan troglodytes verus) named Pinkie, who was found as an infant and sheltered in the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Sierra Leone until her unexpected death at age 9.
These included a few toque macaques ( Macaca sinica), bonnet macaques ( Macaca radiata) and spider monkeys ( Ateles geoffroyi), and among the great apes, an albino western lowland gorilla ( Gorilla gorilla gorilla) was once captured in the wild as an infant and then kept in captivity until its death in adulthood. The scientists described the grisly encounter in a recent study, published July 16 in the American Journal of Primatology, and noted that only a handful of nonhuman primates with albinism have been spotted in the wild in the past.
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