ABOVE: Sarcina ventriculi, a bacterium that causes gastrointestinal symptoms in humans and is related to the Sarcina species found in chimps.
ED UTHMAN, WIKIMEDIA
Scientist sleuths may have solved the mystery of why chimps have been dying at a sanctuary in Sierra Leone. In a study published today (February 3) in Nature Communications, the researchers describe a new species of bacterium in the genus Sarcina that’s associated with a deadly disease of critically endangered Western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus).
The disease, which causes neurological and gastrointestinal symptoms, killed 56 chimps at the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Sierra Leone between 2005 and 2018. “It was not subtle—the chimpanzees would stagger and stumble, vomit, and have diarrhea,” study author Tony Goldberg, an epidemiologist and veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, tells Science. “Sometimes they’d go to bed healthy and be dead in the morning.”
The sanctuary’s staff noticed that the condition was ...
