With the little pests buzzing in your ears, biting your ankles and stabbing your arms, you could easily end up ditching the outdoors for the nearest air-conditioned, insect-free mall.

An Anopheles gambiae mosquito on human skin.

Public Health Image Library

“I hate them, too,” says biologist Elizabeth Willott of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Nevertheless, she chooses to spend a lot of time with the pesky critters. Along with other scientists around the world, Willott is trying to figure out what makes mosquitoes tick.

This may sound like horribly unpleasant work. But the research could save lives. Mosquitoes transmit diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. They carry the West Nile virus, which is now spreading across the United States. The more we know about mosquitoes, scientists say, the better we’ll be able to control them and prevent disease.

Nature’s balance

As annoying as mosquitoes are, Willott argues, they are an essential part of the web of life.

If mosquitoes were to disappear completely, animals that eat them might have trouble getting enough food. The list of mosquito eaters includes frogs, bats, birds, and fish.

Even as disease carriers, mosquitoes have a natural function. “They are one of those things whose job it is to keep [populations] in check,” Willott says.

Sheer diversity alone makes mosquitoes worthy of attention. Around the world, there are about 3,000 species. Some have longer legs or antennae than others have. Some are colored differently. One type has shiny blue legs. A species in Arizona is reddish gold. Another type has black and white stripes on its legs.

A female yellow fever mosquito sits on a piece of Limburger cheese.

Peggy Greb, Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture

“Some of them are actually pretty,” Willott says.

Sucking blood

Only female mosquitoes actually suck blood, and not all species need it to survive. Most mosquitoes supplement their diet with nectar from plants.

To find sources of fresh human blood, mosquitoes fly toward carbon dioxide in the air we exhale. They’re also attracted by heat that comes off our bodies and to chemicals produced by bacteria that live on our skin.

In fact, your particular body chemistry may determine how appealing you smell to a hungry skeeter. This could account for why some people tend to get bitten more often than others.

Different species of mosquitoes prefer different body parts. “Some buzz around your ears and drive you bananas,” Willott says. Others target behind your elbows, behind your knees, or your ankles. Knowing which species live in your area can help you figure out which body parts you should cover up or where you should spray the most bug juice.

“If I were outside in Tucson during the day, I would predict that I would get bitten below the knee,” Willott says. “If I were out in the woods in Colorado, I would be more likely to get bitten on my arms.”

Larva of the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

Public Health Image Library

Mosquito bites itch because the insects inject proteins and other chemicals into your body when they bite. The chemicals help enlarge your blood vessels and keep blood from clotting. This makes it easier for a mosquito to get blood out. The chemicals also cause irritation, activating your immune system, which reacts to the chemicals and creates an unpleasant welt.

Some species seem to deliver bigger wallops than others do. Willott was in a lab once that had a variety of mosquitoes. Some of the critters escaped through tiny holes in their cages and proceeded to bite anyone who ventured into the lab.

“I developed different welts from different species,” she says. Some welts were pink and lumpy. Others were red and flat.

Carrying disease

Although an itchy welt may be annoying, other consequences of mosquito bites can be far more serious. Some mosquitoes carry and spread diseases, including malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, and encephalitis. All of these diseases can kill people.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito spreads yellow fever.

Public Health Image Library

When a mosquito bites a person, bird, or other animal that has one of these diseases, the infected blood gets into the mosquito’s body. In the case of West Nile, the virus then multiplies inside the mosquito over the next few days. When the mosquito bites another animal, it injects the virus. With enough mosquitoes and infected animals in an area, diseases can spread like lightning.

Figuring out which species of mosquitoes spread which diseases is one step toward squelching epidemics altogether, Willott says. With the help of a graduate student, she has been analyzing blood inside one of three species of mosquitoes that live in Tucson. By looking at proteins in the blood, the researchers have learned that the species feeds on both birds and humans.

“That’s important because we’re getting West Nile this year,” she says. West Nile started as a bird disease but has spread to people.

Getting rid of the mosquitoes completely is not an option, Willott says. “But you can tell people the species they have in their backyards is likely to be a [carrier of] West Nile,” she says. “It’s important to be vigilant this summer.”

One way to cut your own risk of getting and spreading diseases such as West Nile is to make your house and yard as mosquito-unfriendly as possible. Mosquito larvae need water to survive. Even the amount of water needed to fill a coffee cup is enough for eggs to grow and hatch.

Discarded tires can collect water and serve as homes for mosquito larvae.

Public Health Image Library

Watch out for standing pools of water in birdbaths, old tires, or saucers under your potted plants. Larvae look like little worms with big heads. As soon as you dump them on the ground, they’ll die.

It’s also a good idea to keep your body covered by wearing long sleeves and pants to avoid getting bitten. Oils and lotions can help too, Willott says.

If you’re going to be outside for long periods of time in buggy places, though, your best bet is to slather on a bug repellent that contains a chemical called DEET.

DEET chemistry

Scientists still don’t know exactly how DEET works. In small doses, the chemical actually attracts mosquitoes. In large amounts, however, the chemical keeps mosquitoes away.

DEET works wonders as a repellent, but it’s toxic and smelly. “Most teenagers would not want to go on a date,” Willott says, “smelling of ‘Eau de DEET.’” Experts are also worried that mosquitoes will eventually get used to DEET, making it less effective.

Better mosquito repellents may be on the way, thanks to chemist Subhash Basak and others. Basak is at the University of Minnesota in Duluth. He’s leading a huge new project to develop alternatives that will repel mosquitoes just as well as DEET does but are less toxic than DEET.

Basak’s lab doesn’t have a single mosquito in it. The researchers rely on computers to do their studies.

Basak and his colleagues start with the chemical structure of DEET. Known as diethyltoluamide, a DEET molecule is made up of 12 carbon atoms, 17 hydrogen atoms, one nitrogen atom, and one oxygen atom.

A DEET molecule. The locations of hydrogen atoms are shown in white, the nitrogen atom in violet, and the oxygen atom in red. Carbon atoms sit at the corners of the gray structures.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

They use a computer to figure out what happens when they make a tiny change to a DEET molecule, such as adding or moving an atom. By looking at the resulting molecule’s shape, they can get an idea if the new substance may be toxic to mosquitoes or people or may damage the environment.

Using a computer allows the researchers to try out thousands of different possibilities, quickly and safely. Once they find 20 or 30 good possibilities, they’ll head into the lab to test them.

“We’re like criminologists,” Basak says. “When you want to find a criminal, you go to the neighborhood where the gang members go, and then you look for the good guys and the bad guys. Our goal is to avoid the bad guys and make the good guys better.”

It’ll be at least 5 years before anything new will be available, Basak says. In the meantime, you might want to do what mosquito scientists do: Keep learning about the fascinating insects, but keep your guard up.

“I can appreciate mosquitoes,” Willott says. But, “that doesn’t alter the fact that when one lands on me, I swat it.”

Going Deeper:

News Detective: Swatting Swarms

Word Find: Mosquitoes

Additional Information

Questions about the Article

Mosquito Facts

• An adult mosquito can live as long as 5 months. It may take several months for a larva to develop to the adult stage in cold water.
• An adult female mosquito weighs about 2.0 milligrams.
• An adult female mosquito takes in about 5-millionths of a liter of blood in a single meal.
• A mosquito wing beats from 300 to 600 times per second.
• Male mosquitoes find female mosquitoes by listening to the sound of their wings beating. The males can actually identify the correct species by the pitch of the female’s wings.
• Mosquitoes can fly about 1 to 1.5 miles per hour.
• A mosquito can detect the carbon dioxide you exhale from about 60 to 75 feet away.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Now, a new study of sleep in sparrows suggests that the link between sleep and the ability to learn may be more complicated than people realized. During migration season, these sparrows do well in learning tests even when they’ve had very little sleep.

White-crowned sparrows fly mostly by night and eat by day as they migrate up to 4,300 kilometers each spring and fall.

Niels C. Rattenborg, University of Wisconsin–Madison

White-crowned sparrows migrate enormous distances. In the spring, they fly 4,300 kilometers from southern California to Alaska. In the fall, they make the trip back. The sparrows fly at night and spend their days looking for food. This means that during migration, they get about one-third as much sleep as they do at other times of the year.

Niels C. Rattenborg of the University of Wisconsin–Madison wanted to find out how the sparrows were able to deal with getting so much less sleep. Also, could the birds get by with less sleep even when they weren’t migrating?

To find out, Rattenborg and his colleagues brought eight wild birds into a lab and monitored them for 1 year. They invented a game to check how well the birds could learn. In the game, the sparrows had to peck three buttons in a certain order to get a food treat.

The scientists discovered that the birds’ ability to learn the right button sequence depended on two things: the time of year and how much sleep the birds had had.

During migration season, the sparrows were restless at night and got much less sleep than usual. Even so, they were able to figure out how to get the food treats just as quickly as if they’d had a regular night of sleep.

Outside migration season, the scientists disturbed the birds at night to make sure they got less sleep than they normally would at that time of year. They found that the sparrows had much more difficulty learning how to get the food treats than birds that had a regular night’s sleep.

The results suggest that the sparrows can get by with much less sleep during the migration season than they can at other times of the year. If scientists can find out why this is, they may be able to learn from sparrows and find ways of helping people cope with lack of sleep.

Still, until scientists fully understand the relationship between sleep and learning, it’s better to play it safe and get plenty of shut-eye when getting ready for that next exam.—S. McDonagh

Going Deeper:

Milius, Susan. 2004. Sparrows cheat on sleep: Migratory birds are up at night but still stay sharp. Science News 166(July 17):38. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040717/fob7.asp .

You can learn more about the white-crowned sparrow at www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/id/framlst/i5540id.html (U.S. Geological Survey) and birds.cornell.edu/BOW/WHCSPA/ (Cornell University).

Now, scientists have figured out how one particular parasite does it—by forcing its host sand fly to spit up.

Female sand flies are bloodsuckers that can carry Leishmania parasites from dogs, foxes, and other animals to humans.

Public Health Image Library

First, the parasite multiplies in a sand fly’s throat, floating in a blob of gel it makes for itself. Then, when the fly bites a person, the fly spits up, depositing the gel and its cargo of parasites into the person’s bloodstream. The infection spreads rapidly.

It sounds gross, but it’s definitely effective. About 12 million people around the world are infected with different species of these parasites, known as leishmania. Some species of these single-celled organisms are lethal. Leishmania mexicana, which the scientists studied, is one of the milder forms. If the infection isn’t treated, the parasite causes skin lesions that can leave severe scars.

Leishmania mexicana takes advantage of how sand flies make a living. These flies must feed on blood, from humans or other mammals, to survive. When a sand fly bites a mammal, the fly coughs up the blob of leishmania gel into the mammal’s bloodstream, sending countless parasites on their way.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool in England wanted to find out how important the gel is for the leishmania parasite to infect its host. If there were no gel, would the parasite still invade the new host successfully? They did some tests with mice to find out.

When they injected the parasite along with the gel, skin lesions appeared quickly. But when they injected the parasite on its own, without the gel, they found that skin lesions took longer to appear.

This result suggested that something in the gel gives the parasite a boost, speeding up the process of infection. The scientists then figured out that a particular type of protein in the gel is the important ingredient. But they’re not sure exactly how this protein does its job. If researchers can work out how the protein works, it may help them design a vaccine that can combat leishmania.

A new vaccine won’t help sand flies, though. Once infected, these little critters are stuck with leishmania—and the accompanying blobs of gel—for life.—S. McDonagh

Going Deeper:

Seppa, Nathan. 2004. Parasite pursuit: Sand fly coughs up leishmania protozoan’s secrets of proliferation. Science News 166(July 24):53. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040724/fob6.asp .

You can get information about Leishmania and the infections this parasite causes at www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dpd/parasites/leishmania/factsht_leishmania.htm and www.dpd.cdc.gov/dpdx/HTML/Leishmaniasis.htm (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

On June 30, the first space mission focused just on Saturn plunged through the giant planet’s rings. For the next 4 years, if all goes as planned, a spacecraft called Cassini will orbit Saturn, sending loads of information back to Earth about the planet’s atmosphere, its moons, and its rings.

Artist’s impression of the Cassini spacecraft approaching Saturn’s delicate rings of dust and rocks.

NASA/JPL

But wait, there’s more. In December, Cassini will release a probe called Huygens that will plummet to the surface of Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan. There, astronomers hope to gain insights into the chemistry and origins of life on Earth.

“The next 6 months should . . . be very exciting,” says Jonathan Lunine. He’s a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Lunine has been working on the mission for more than 20 years. “Our expectation is that the unexpected will happen,” he says.

Sixth planet

Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun, farther away than Jupiter but closer than Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. You might recognize it for its spectacular set of rings, but Saturn has plenty of other cool features.

This portrait of Saturn and its rings was put together from a pair of images taken by cameras aboard the Cassini spacecraft when it was 17.6 million miles from Saturn.

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

For one thing, it’s just a big ball of gas, so there would be nothing to stand on, even if you could get there. The planet is so low in density that it would actually float in water if you could find a bathtub big enough for it. And it has at least 31 moons.

Most of what we already know about Saturn comes from remote observations and brief fly-bys. In 1980 and 1981, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft took pictures of Saturn as they passed by on their way to the outer planets. That’s when scientists discovered how exciting Titan is.

Titan’s atmosphere

Titan is small compared to Saturn, but it’s bigger than our moon, and it’s bigger than the planet Mercury. Amazingly, it also happens to be the only moon in our solar system that has its own atmosphere. Scientists such as Lunine can’t wait to get a closer look.

Cassini’s cameras have captured dramatic views of Saturn’s moon Titan, revealing complex surface markings.

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

That’s because Titan’s thick atmosphere has some of the same gases that we have here on Earth, including nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and lots of methane. Methane is the simplest carbon-containing molecule, made up of one atom of carbon and four atoms of hydrogen. On Earth, it’s produced by the decay of plants and animals.

Learning more about Titan might lead to insights about how life formed on Earth, Lunine says. Long before anything lived here, our planet was a biochemical soup of water and basic elements. Out of this primeval stew, somehow cells and life developed.

Titan has plenty of water, too, though it’s all frozen. The moon is a frigid –178 degrees Celsius at its surface.

Because of volcanic activity or meteor impacts, however, chunks of ice might melt briefly in some places, Lunine says. In such cases, the conditions on Titan could resemble those on Earth billions of years ago.

Lunine doesn’t expect to find traces of life on Titan. But the building blocks of life might be there. He wouldn’t be surprised to find amino acids, for instance, which make up proteins.

“Titan is our only natural laboratory for studying how you go from this real mish-mash of organic chemistry to this very specific situation called life,” Lunine says.

Long mission

Lunine has been looking forward to the Cassini mission for a long time. Astronomers first considered the idea of sending a spacecraft to Saturn in the early 1980s, and Lunine became involved soon after. Scientific planning began in earnest in 1990, and the mission was launched in 1997.

Lunine was there to see the dramatic launch, early on the morning of Oct. 15. “There happened to be a cumulous cloud on the launch pad,” he says. “When the rocket passed through, it looked like hundreds of people turning flashlights on and off.”

A video camera captured the launch of the Cassini spacecraft aboard a Titan IVB/Centaur rocket on Oct. 15, 1997.

NASA/JPL

Just a few days after the launch, researchers in Tucson could see Cassini-Huygens through their telescopes. It looked like a tiny dot moving through the sky.

In reality, the Cassini spacecraft is about the size of a small school bus, with a big antenna. It weighs 1,400 pounds and carries 12 instruments. The Huygens probe is roughly spherical and has a diameter of about 6 feet. By itself, it weighs about 700 pounds and carries six instruments.

Instruments include various cameras, which pick up different kinds of light, and equipment called mass spectrometers and gas chromatographs. Some instruments will work alone. Others will work together. All are essential for uncovering details about the atmosphere and surface of both Titan and Saturn.

The mission will also zero in on Saturn’s rings, its icy moons, magnetic fields, and charged particles that lurk around the planet.

A close-up of a gap within one of Saturn’s rings shows curious ripples and other delicate features.

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Planning, designing, and programming the Cassini-Huygens mission has required more than 2 decades of dedicated work by hundreds of astronomers and engineers in both the United States and Europe. Some experts focus on a single instrument. Others, such Lunine, are known as interdisciplinary scientists.

“We’re kind of like the glue,” Lunine says. “We take many different sets of data from different instruments and put a picture together in one scientific area.”

By the time the mission is over, thousands of scientists and students will be involved, digging through the data and trying to interpret what they find.

Risky doings

The basic plan for the mission, now that the spacecraft has arrived at Saturn, is pretty much set. During its 4-year sojourn, Cassini will orbit Saturn 75 times. It will pass near Titan 45 times, and it will use the moon’s gravity to propel itself into different orbits without wasting fuel.

That is, if nothing goes wrong. Despite all the planning, every space mission comes with risks. Cassini had to travel a billion miles just to get to Saturn. Some of its orbits will pass through Saturn’s rings, where dust and big chunks of rock can be a danger. It takes an hour and a half for radio signals to reach the craft from Earth, which means the spacecraft’s computer system needs to be able to respond on its own to unexpected events.

Technicians working on the Huygens probe before its launch together with the Cassini spacecraft.

European Space Agency

The Huygens probe faces challenges, too. It’s scheduled to detach itself from Cassini on Dec. 24 and reach Titan on Jan. 15, 2005. Once there, it will cruise through the moon’s atmosphere, taking pictures and collecting other kinds of information. Then, it will crash into Titan’s surface at a speed of 10 to 15 miles per hour. If Huygens survives the landing, it will only have between 5 and 30 minutes to explore before Cassini moves out of range or the probe’s lithium batteries run out. In total, the probe’s mission will last about 3 hours.

After the long, long wait, scientists involved with Cassini-Huygens are holding their breath, hoping everything works out. “I’m trying to let my fingernails grow,” Lunine says, “so I can chew them down again.”

Uncertainty is the name of the game when it comes to deep-space missions. The Mars Polar Lander, for instance, crashed in 1999. Right now, though, two rovers on Mars have far surpassed their expected lifetimes and have sent back an extraordinary wealth of information about the Red Planet.

“Planetary exploration has big highs and big lows,” Lunine says. It’s worth the risk, he adds, because there’s so much left to learn about the universe.

“In the end,” he says, “you just have to keep your fingers crossed.”

Going Deeper:

Word Find: Saturn

Additional Information

Questions about the Article

Saturn Facts:

• Average distance from sun: 887 million miles, or 1.43 billion kilometers.
• Time to orbit the sun: 29 years and 174 days.
• Time it takes to rotate on its axis: 10.5 hours.
• Diameter: 74,897 miles or 120,584 kilometers.
• Surface temperature: –301° Fahrenheit, or –185° Celsius.

The way a tomato plant grows depends on how a farmer mulches and fertilizes it, say researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They’ve uncovered some unexpected details about the biochemistry that goes into producing the juicy red fruit.

These photos show two fields of Sunbeam tomatoes planted at the same time and photographed on the same day. Tomatoes with black plastic around the plants and given standard doses of fertilizer (left) developed more leaf disease and aged faster than the sa

Dave Clark, Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture

To cut down on weeds and make plants grow more quickly, farmers and gardeners often put black plastic around their tomato plants. Instead of plastic mulch, however, some growers have long preferred to use a type of plant called vetch as mulch.

Over the winter, the farmers grow hairy vetch, which belongs to the bean family. When springtime comes, they mow the vetch and plant tomatoes in the cuttings. The vetch keeps weeds out and nutrients in. Some research has shown that tomatoes last longer and get fewer fungal diseases when grown in dried vetch.

To understand why the system works so well, the researchers first compared two fields of tomatoes. One field got a mulch of vetch and a half dose of fertilizer. The other field got a mulch of plastic and a full dose of fertilizer.

In years with enough rain, tomatoes in the plastic-mulched field began to grow a little bit sooner. But vetch-mulched fields yielded a bigger, healthier crop.

Then, the researchers compared specific genes and proteins in the two crops. In the vetch-mulched plants, they found higher activity in two genes that help protect the plants from fungal attacks and two genes that control how the plants age.

Vetch-mulched tomatoes end up with especially big root systems. So, the researchers suspect that these plants are better at extracting nutrients from the soil. Better nutrition could affect how certain genes work.

Spaghetti sauce anyone?—E. Sohn

Going Deeper:

Milius, Susan. 2004. Plastic vs. plants: Mulch method changes tomato’s gene activity. Science News 166(July 10):21. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040710/fob5.asp .

You can learn about growing more and better tomatoes at www.ars.usda.gov/is/tom/ (Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture).

Comments:

I love tomatoes. I eat them raw every day. It’s good to see appreciation for
tomatoes.—Brittany, 14

Now, it looks like fish weren’t the only animals on the spinosaur menu. Paleontologists from France recently uncovered fossil evidence in northeastern Brazil that spinosaurs also may have feasted on flying reptiles.

The tip of a spinosaur tooth (arrow in top image and shown in bottom image) stuck in a pterosaur neck bone suggests that spinosaurs sometimes preyed upon or scavenged the remains of flying reptiles.

Hipkin, Eric Buffetaut

The scientists found three fossil neck bones, buried in rocks that are about 100 million years old. One of the bones had a piece of a tooth sticking out of it.

The neck bones belonged to an ancient flying reptile called a pterosaur. The animal was probably about 3.3 meters long from wingtip to wingtip.

The tooth fragment found in its neck was about 1 centimeter long. It was shaped like a cone, and its enamel coating was smooth and thin.

Based on these features, the researchers suggest that the tooth belonged to a type of spinosaur called Irritator challengeri. This spinosaur typically grew to be 10 meters long, walked on two feet, and ate meat.

Paleontologists had previously found remains of fish scales in the stomachs of ancient spinosaurs. And some researchers had unearthed a spinosaur that apparently had eaten parts of a young plant-eating dino. The new finding shows that flying reptiles were also on the menu.

The researchers still don’t know if the spinosaur killed the pterosaur or just chomped on one that was already dead. Either way, the predator probably didn’t mind losing a bit of tooth. Spinosaurs were constantly replacing their teeth.—E. Sohn

Going Deeper:

Perkins, S. 2004. Neck bones on the menu: Fossil vertebrae show species interaction. Science News 166(July 3):6. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040703/fob7.asp .

You can learn more about spinosaurs at yahooligans.yahoo.com/content/science/
dinosaurs/dino_card/42.html (Yahooligans), www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/
dinosaurs/dinos/Spinosaurus.shtml (Enchanted Learning) and www.dinoworld.net/spino.htm (Dinosaur World).

Chimpanzees, orangutans, and other primates might feel the same way, says Lyn Miles. She’s an anthropologist at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “Apes are bored to death in most facilities,” she says. “They pace. They develop nervous habits. They get depressed.”

Miles is a member of a vocal group of scientists and activists who say that captive apes deserve a richer life than they get in most zoos and primate centers. As president of a foundation called Animal Nation (formerly ApeNet), Miles is working with celebrities and others to create special preserves for primates. She described her project at a recent meeting of the American Primatological Society in Madison, Wis.

A portrait of the orangutan known as Chantek, now a resident of Zoo Atlanta.

Chantek Foundation

Instead of just giving monkeys a phone book to rip up every once in a while to keep them amused, Miles envisions a place where apes have the freedom to decide what they want for breakfast and whether to play tic-tac-toe or make music.

Featuring tool making, music, and arts and crafts, “it would be a place where the entire lifestyle is based on developing the intellectual capacity of these animals,” Miles says.

Raising Chantek

Miles’ beliefs about primate intelligence come from nearly 27 years of experience with an orangutan named Chantek. From 1978, when he was 9 months old, until 1986, Chantek lived with Miles in a trailer on campus. She raised him as she would a human child.

To communicate with her foster primate, Miles taught Chantek sign language. He learned to tell her what he wanted for breakfast. He cupped his hands together to say he wanted more. His vocabulary grew to more than 150 words.

Lyn Miles shows a necklace made by Chantek.

Emily Sohn

From the beginning, Chantek was also responsible for doing chores. He had to clean his bedroom to get his allowance. He helped cook spaghetti for dinner.

Over time, Miles and Chantek grew closer. In many ways, she says, he started to act more and more like a real kid. She took him to fast food restaurants, lakes, and playgrounds. They would go to a nearby mountain to watch hang gliders soaring in the air. They even celebrated holidays together.

To describe Christmas, Chantek used signs to say “Red Hat Day.” His name for Miles was “Mother Lyn.”

Tool time

At some point, Miles noticed that Chantek was fascinated by tools. So she gave Chantek supplies and encouraged him to explore. She figured anything was possible.

In the wild, orangutans constantly have to solve problems, Miles says. For example, they have to figure out how to get ants out of a log. In captivity, it might make sense for them to apply these problem-solving skills to artistic pursuits.

After using signs to ask Miles about her jewelry, Chantek strung beads onto a string and gave it to her. She felt an overwhelming sense of pride. “He said it was a necklace,” she says. “I just cried.”

In 1986, after Chantek had grown too large for his quarters in Chattanooga, he was moved to the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta.

Today, Chantek is 27 years old, and he has lived at Zoo Atlanta since 1997. Miles visits him often. He still makes jewelry, using his mouth and hands to string the beads and to tie special knots that make the necklaces adjustable. He also creates what Miles describes as “found art assemblages” out of interesting objects that he finds lying around.

To top it off, Chantek participates in a band called Animal Nation, which was formed by Miles. The band has five human members, who play a variety of traditional instruments from around the world, often in unusual ways. Their music uses lots of percussion and has a strong beat.

Human members of the Animal Nation band wearing their animal masks.

Animal Nation

Chantek helps compose the music, Miles says. “He plays notes on the keyboard, and we write songs around his efforts,” she says. “He also keeps the beat.”

The people in the band wear animal masks when they perform. Chantek doesn’t have to dress up.

Ape communication

Miles uses the term “enculturation” to describe Chantek’s integration into human society. She says he’s the only enculturated orangutan in the world.

Other anthropologists have cultivated similar capabilities in gorillas and chimpanzees. In captivity, some of these primates have also learned sign language. Others can count and do simple math.

Even in the wild, researchers have been awed by humanlike gestures in nonhuman primates. Anthropologist Jane Goodall, for one, still marvels at the time a chimpanzee reached out and gently tapped her arm. Goodall spent many years getting to know chimpanzees at Gombe National Park in Tanzania.

Some experts disagree with the idea of “humanizing” apes. Because many types of primates look a bit like us, it’s tempting to see pieces of ourselves in them, they say. This resemblance, however, doesn’t mean that our interpretations of the animals’ behaviors and needs are correct. And it isn’t necessarily fair to assume that what makes us happy makes apes happy, too.

One of many necklaces made by Chantek.

Emily Sohn

Miles argues that human-primate interactions might open a window into another universe, right here on Earth. There are people looking for signs of intelligent life in outer space, she says. Why not make contact with intelligence here at home first?

“When I was a girl,” Miles says, “I used to look out the window and wonder what was out there. Now, I make contact with nonhuman intelligence every day.”

The more we communicate with primates, she adds, the more we might learn about them and about our own origins.

Miles remembers one rainy day when Chantek grabbed a big leaf to use as an umbrella. Then, he ripped it, gave half to her, and signed that she should put it on her head. “I felt like he was reaching across millions of years,” she notes, “saying, ‘I care about you. I don’t want you to get wet either.’”

Future sanctuary

Rock star Peter Gabriel started the foundation called Animal Nation in 2002. One of the foundation’s goals is to create a culture-based preserve for apes in Hawaii on the island of Maui.

This sanctuary would house all four types of great apes—orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos. The apes would have lots of land across which to roam and lots of intellectual stimulation, including puzzles to play with and materials for art projects. The facilities would be open to the public, and people could interact with resident animals over the Internet.

If all goes well, the center could open in a couple years. So far, Animal Nation has raised more than $10 million toward this goal, Miles says. The organization is also trying to obtain funds for a second sanctuary in the Atlanta area for Chantek.

Recognizing primate intelligence could help motivate people to protect the animals and their habitats, says Shelly Williams. She’s a primatologist at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Mystery ape

And there’s still a lot to learn about primates, including the possibility of discovering new species of apes. “In this day and age, to find a new type of ape would be astounding,” Williams says.

Nonetheless, Williams has come across evidence of what might be such an animal. In two expeditions to an isolated area in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa, Williams has encountered groups of large apes that look and behave like neither chimpanzees nor gorillas nor bonobos but seem to combine some features of all three.

For example, unlike chimpanzees, which typically nest in trees, some of these apes build large ground nests in or near water.

Some individuals appear to be larger than gorillas. Williams brought a mold of one of the newly found creature’s footprints to the primate meeting in Madison. The footprint was enormous—larger than that of the average gorilla.

Shelly Williams with a mold of the footprint of a newly found giant primate.

Emily Sohn

It isn’t clear yet whether these apes belong to a new species or are somehow directly related to known primates. Observations suggest that there may even be as many as four distinct types of apes in this isolated region of Africa.

Who knows what remains to be discovered—whether you’re communicating with apes in preserves or observing primates in the wild?

Going Deeper:

News Detective: Pondering Primates

Word Find: Ape Nation

Additional Information

Questions about the Article