When conservation scientist Laura Kehoe writes about a surprising chimp behavior, the media takes it wildly out of context and the situation spirals out of control.

Laura Kehoe is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia & University of Victoria, where she's busy developing a cost-effective conservation plan for the over 100 species of concern in the Fraser River estuary, Vancouver. Laura’s research has the overall goal of finding pathways to balance human resource use with the conservation of biodiversity. To do this, she develops & applies approaches grounded in spatial statistics, spatial ecology, & conservation decision science. Laura is the founder of a campaign to regenerate degraded farmland via planting trees. To date, her initiative has planted over 100,000 trees (visit 400trees.org to find out more). This story is about her first job in conservation with the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation in Guinea.

This story originally aired on April 12, 2019 in an episode titled “Limelight: Stories about being the voice of science”.

Story Transcript

As a scientist, I study the ways to conserve the most species for the least amount of money.  But, unfortunately, that’s not what I’m most well known for.

It’s 2011 and I've got my first ever conservation job.  I’m thrilled because I got to study wild chimpanzees in the Republic of Guinea.  This isn’t Papua New Guinea, it’s not Equatorial Guinea, it’s the Guinea you probably never heard of.  It’s in West Africa and it’s beside the Ivory Coast. It’s home to one of the last strongholds of West African chimpanzees in the world.  

And so - super excited - I get out there but it’s not smooth sailing.  I can model chimp population dynamics pretty well from my desk but, it turns out, I can’t even actually walk properly through the savannah.  It’s covered in thorns. I’m covered in thorns. Everyday I’m ripping up my clothes on these thorns. I’m covered in duct tape, actually, because I don't have the time to sew the clothes back together.  The group that I’m supposed to be leading I’m more often than not, because of this, found at the back.

But on this particular day, I’m happy because I got to catch up to the group because they've stopped at this clearing in the bush.  Our guide, Mamadou Alioh Bah, he's the local chief of the village and farmer, he notices some markings in the bark of a tree. They're basically scratches.  There's pieces of bark missing from the tree.

Some others in the group think that it’s just wild pigs, others think it’s teenage boys messing around, but Alioh has a hunch.  And this guy, he can spot chimp hair on the forest floor. He can spot chimps kilometers away with his bare eyes that I can’t find with my fancy-schmancy binoculars.  He even found chimp pee once on the forest floor under a chimp nest in a leaf. This guy is incredible. So when he has a hunch you listen to that hunch.

So myself and Lucy, who’s the other foreign researcher in the team, we look at each other and we think, yeah, let’s put a camera here.  

So we have these camera traps and, basically, they record any movement in front of them.  They're handy for spying on wildlife for that reason because they don’t intrude on the wildlife.  So we put this camera trap on one of the trees and we leave it for a couple of weeks, and I always get excited when we leave a camera trap because who knows what we might find.  Nobody has ever studied this area before so maybe we find a new species. Maybe we find a completely new behavior to science.

But these are total daydreams because, actually, what we generally find is just tree branches swaying in the wind setting off the motion sensor, or cows walking past who just love licking the camera lens.  So we have all these close-up videos of tongues just back and forth, leaving the whole thing completely covered in saliva and not useful for the rest of the time we stayed there.

Anyway, we get back to this spot, to our mystery tree and we pick up the camera card and we get back to camp.  Excitedly, we put it in the laptop to see what we found. What we find is actually kind of cool.

So this big, male chimp, he ambles up into view.  You know he's male because he has these huge balls knocking back and forth.  Chimps have massive balls. You should just look it up when you get home. It’s impressive.  Three times the weight of human balls.

Anyway, so he pauses in front of our tree and he picks up this huge rock and he goes [makes monkey noise] and he flings the rock at the tree.  Bam! It smacks the tree and falls down. Question answered. That’s what’s going on.

We’re shocked for like what the hell is this.  We got shivers down our spine. Our guide is standing there smiling, proud of himself that he was correct, but we don’t know what the hell this is about.  

You might be thinking, “All right.  I've seen monkeys throw stones in the zoo.  What’s the big deal?”

Well, actually, when we told the rest of the researchers and everybody began searching for this, we found that it was happening on these distinct sites only in West Africa, only in four countries in West Africa.  The chimps were revisiting these same trees and doing this again and again, and only at specific trees in the landscape so not just any old tree. It was very strange.

So what are they up to?  Well, the first thing that we thought was maybe it’s to do with a male display.  Male displays are all about looking big, looking cool and so maybe picking up a heavy rock, making a loud noise.  That’s cool. That’s going to impress the lady chimps.

Or maybe it’s long-distance communication.  So chimps actually use, they drum on the roots of large buttress trees and that drumming travels long distances.  It’s kind of like Morse Code so others in the group might change their direction or they might meet up in a certain time and place.  So it’s pretty cool in itself. And in this area, there weren’t many large roots for them to do that on so maybe they were doing this as another form of long-distance communication.  

But the thing is we got footage of juvenile chimps just quietly placing stones inside the hollow tree or at the base of it so it doesn’t really fit with those theories, right?

Other researchers they think maybe it’s to do with landmarking.  Maybe we get these piles of stones at the base of trees to indicate a chimp’s territory.  This is an important stage in human history and it was how we used to landmark things. Maybe chimps were doing the same thing.  

But we also have footage of a female chimp with a juvenile placing the stones in these piles.  And it’s weird for a female with her kid to be out in the boundary of the territory because that’s actually a dangerous spot to be.  That’s where fights break out between different chimp communities.

So it’s a mystery.  We don’t know what it is but we describe the behavior.  Over 80 other researchers worked really hard on this and together we published the scientific paper on it.  

When the paper comes out, I think, “I really care about science communication so I should write something about this,” because I want to bring more attention to our guide, Alioh.  Without him we definitely would not have found this.

And I also want to bring attention to chimp conservation because the chimps are in trouble in the wild.  So it’s a good platform to bring some attention towards conservation.

So I write the blog and I talk about Alioh and I talk the behavior and what it could mean.  And I also talk about something that I learned from the other researchers on this, the anthropologists, that actually the piles of stones they also resemble human sacred sites, where humans would create these kinds of stone piles and they would form these special sites in human culture around in the world.  

So I put a line in my article and I say, “Maybe what we found here is the first evidence of chimps creating a kind of sacred site.”  That was a mistake. It was a big mistake.

The article, it gets republished like almost immediately in many different news sites.  What you don’t know when you see an article online is, actually, the editors can change the title.  So my article gets reposted but the title changes to, “Is This Evidence of Spirituality in the Wild?”  

And it culminates when a friend of mine sends me an article in the Daily Mail, that’s a widely-read tabloid in the U.K., front page, Daily Mail, across the top, “Is This Proof Chimps Believe in God?”  

I’m sitting in my office and I open the article.  It’s funny now but it was not funny at the time. I’m sitting there looking at it and I could feel like my heartbeat just pumping in my eardrums as I read this because I see my name.  They've actually pretended to interview me for this.

And they say, “For many scientists, they have a professional dread of foisting human ideas on non-humans.  And the idea of religious animals is about as farfetched as you can get. Yet Kehoe,” that’s me, “stuck to her guns.”

Then they put that one line completely out of context as if I'd said it, as if I believe that chimps are religious.

I’m Irish, right?  I know. But I’m not even religious and I definitely don’t think chimps are religious, but this is how it appears.  

I start to get really worried.  I’m coming towards the end of my PhD and I kind of like to have a job after my PhD.  I’m imagining future employers Googling my name and the whole first page of Google search results is covered in this madness.  

So I think, “Okay.  I need to clear my name.  I need to clarify the science and I need to bring the attention back to chimp conservation.”  

So I do more interviews with journalists.  I talk on podcasts. I try to get the word out.  I talk about the behavior and I talk about what it could be, what it might not be, how it’s most likely communication but we simply don’t know.  And we constantly underestimate other species. It is a mystery, right?

Of course, they then cut that down to, “We simply don’t know.  We constantly underestimate other species.” And then use that bloody line again from the original blog.  

And so it spreads further.  I get emails from French, Spanish friends that have seen it in their news, you know, the religious chimpanzee.  I don't know what it is, but it was just spreading.

I was completely ashamed.  Science is supposed to be about the truth and I was doing the exact opposite here.  I should have written something, tried to clear my name, but I knew that some kind of piece all about, “Oh, no, I’m misunderstood,” it would be read like a fraction of the percentage of the original news.  And the truth really dawned on me that sensationalist, click-bait news like this, it spreads faster and it’s more memorable than any other type of information.

So I basically just cower away.  I don't know what to do so I just shrink back.  My big hope here is that some religious millionaire comes across this story, somehow believes it, and decides to donate their life’s worth to chimp conservation.  But not very likely, right?

But I keep trying.  I keep trying to communicate my research and to do my best because these chimps are in trouble.  They have lost 80% of their population in the past 25 years. They will go extinct in the wild if things carry on in this way.  In our lifetime they will disappear, along with all of the amazing things that they do. And all of the other species out there too that are also in trouble.  

So I do keep trying because it’s too important to me not to.  I’m slightly better at it now because I've learnt the hard way.  But if you do hear about spiritual salmon or killer whale cults around Vancouver, you'll know who to blame.  Thank you.