A healthy population of chimpanzees may be threatened by a mining project.🙈 A new study, co-authored by several Re:wild primatologists, provided the first-ever estimate of the chimpanzee population living on the western flank of the Nimba Mountains: 136 chimpanzees living in four communities. Mt. Nimba, which straddles the borders of Guinea, Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire, is a towering massif packed with incredible plants, animals and fungi. Its biodiversity has earned it status as a UNESCO World Heritage site and as a biosphere reserve. Counting the number of chimpanzees living on the western flank of the Nimba mountains was no easy feat—it took 15 years of monitoring. The chimpanzees are not habituated to humans, meaning they avoid researchers. So researchers turned to analyzing the DNA in 663 chimpanzee fecal samples. The analysis showed that individual chimpanzees migrate between communities, successfully mate and have babies—and that migration has helped keep the population in the...