Thursday, March 12, 2009

News story on Aimee and update on Tia

The local news in Des Moines, KCCI, did a news story last night on the return of Aimee. Both Kelly Boyer and Dondo Kante report that Tia and Aimee are doing fine and that, in fact, Tia is cycling again. This is fairly rare - that a female with such a young infant begins cycling again. Tia began cycling before Aimee was captured by the hunters, so that incident had nothing to do with this resumption in receptivity. There was, similarly, a female at Mahale, Tanzania that began cycling again only 7 months following the birth of her infant. Females at Fongoli resume cycling (based on our small sample size so far...) more quickly than East African chimps and along the lines of what other West African studies have reported (Tai Forest, for example). Some interesting patterns...