A hybrid male in the study group in Gombe National ParkMANENO MPONGO/GOMBE HYBRID MONKEY PROJECT
Back in 2004, Kate Detwiler had her binoculars trained on a guenon monkey perched in a tree deep in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. She was waiting for the monkey to defecate so she could alert her husband and field assistant, James Gray, who was clambering on his hands and knees through the dense undergrowth towards the tree to grab the sample.
Minutes later, Gray quickly reemerged from the thicket, empty-handed and white as a sheet. He had come across a coiled-up forest cobra at the base of the tree and had to beat a hasty retreat. “The cobra was sleeping,” recalls Detwiler, a primatologist at Florida Atlantic University, “and it was just huge.”
Snakes, Gombe’s steep landscape, and competition for samples with enterprising dung beetles ...
