At the Leipzig zoo's Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center last summer, a 3-year-old female gorilla named Kibara was going berserk. She had just been given a new type of food, deep-red colored candies with a rich mango scent. Kibara had never smelled mango before, and she couldn't get enough of the aromatic treat. "Kibara was crazy, running from one point to another, cracking open [the candies], and eating them up," recalls Martina Neumann, a behavioral biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. "She was just like, 'this is sweet; I love it.'"
Kibara was the subject of a pilot study on delivering oral vaccines to great apes. Now that a handful of experimental Ebola vaccines have proven effective in laboratory monkeys, researchers need to find a way of delivering a vaccine to apes in the wild. But the baits used for decades to deliver a rabies ...
