Summary: Chimpanzees in the wild are not helped when they are old and they need to be self-employed, and they do. Monkeys age better and remain autonomous because they exercise

This chimpanzee named Yogi, pictured here in October 2011, among the approximately 60 wild animals studied as part of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in Uganda.
When Aunt Rose died in early 2007, she was the oldest known wild chimpanzee.
She was about 63 years of age, which is a lot for her kind of her, and her last months of hers have been difficult.
She had lost all her fur and could only crawl through the forest, recalls Emily Otali, chief operating officer of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in Uganda and Explorer for National Geographic.
I suffered for her.
This curious chimpanzee makes an alternative use of the selfie stick!
Images from the Bestial Selfie series.
Yet, until the end, Aunt Rose took care of herself.
Adult chimpanzees rarely share food, even with older chimpanzees, so they must continue to feed themselves.
Animals later with let in the wild are less active, Otali says, and can also weaken a bit, losing muscle mass over time.
But they handle old age much better than we humans.
They remain autonomous, they are amazing.
Scientists have been observing wild Kanyawara chimpanzees in Kibale National Park since 1987 to learn more about primate behavior and possible relationships with that of modern humans.
Photograph by Ronan Donovan
Meanwhile, chimps at US biomedical research facilities were considered elderly after age 35.
For years, hundreds of chimpanzees have been experimented with in four facilities to prevent and treat human diseases.
When these captive animals began to develop known ailments associated with human aging, such as heart disease and diabetes, researchers marveled at how similar they were to us.
When the National Institutes of Health (NIH) decided to stop invasive chimpanzee research and moved the animals to U.S. sanctuaries in 2015, a report found that dozens of specimens, many of which had a lot of under 60, they were too weak to move.
But the experiments they had undergone could not be the only cause of that state.
Research conducted on chimpanzees in the wild and in African sanctuaries, where animals have plenty of room to roam, show better health in older chimpanzees than their peers in labs.
This gives us clear guidance on how to care for chimpanzees still in captivity.
These findings also suggest that studying the health problems of laboratory chimps may not have taught us much about their natural aging process.
Conversely, the fate of these sickly captive chimpanzees may provide us with more information about the risks of the increasingly sedentary lifestyle of many humans.
Over the years, people often become less active following the self-fulfilling prophecy that it is natural for the body to weaken over time and for health conditions to inevitably worsen.
Yet wild chimps like Aunt Rose, who had to travel many miles a day in search of food and received no treatment if sick or injured, appear to age better, according to University of New Mexico anthropologist Melissa Emery Thompson, co-director of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project.
Even studies conducted on individuals from hunter-gatherer populations, many of whom remain extremely active until the end of their lives, often show a prolongation of the state of good health compared to those who take it easy from a certain age onwards, he says. Emery Thompson.
For example, the walking speed among members of the Hadza ethnic group in Tanzania, who carry on their lifelong foraging activities, does not appear to decrease significantly with aging.
Not physical activity but the inactivity that weakens us, she adds.
At the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda, the chimpanzees confiscated from poachers live in large fenced areas of tropical forest where they are free to roam.
Every year, veterinarians check their health by sedating the animals to create the perfect conditions to collect data on their aging process.
Based on studies in captive populations, scientists believed that cholesterol levels in chimpanzees were very high, says University of Michigan anthropologist Alexandra Rosati.
But in a recent study, Rosati and her colleagues found that the chimpanzees at the Ngamba Island sanctuary had a much lower cholesterol level than the laboratory chimps.
Likewise, other cardiovascular risk markers, such as body weight, were lower in Ngamba Island chimpanzees, Rosati says.
The explanation, he adds, could be that the latter have the ability to move much more than chimpanzees in the laboratories and also feed on larger quantities of fruit and vegetables (which partly grow spontaneously in the sanctuary area) and less nutrient-rich chimpanzee food that is typically provided in labs.
Not that the chimps show no signs of aging, says Joshua Rukundo, former veterinary chief and now director of the Ngamba Island sanctuary.
Joint inflammation common in older chimps, he says.
They also often have dental problems that make it difficult for them to digest fibrous food.
The resulting lack of these foods affects the immune system making them vulnerable to disease.
But Rukundo adds that most of these symptoms can be treated.
In this sense, when it comes to healthy aging, Ngamba Island chimpanzees can have the best of both worlds: large spaces in which they can move as they would in the wild, and some of the privileges of life in captivity, such as extra food and medical care. .
This could be an inspiration for how to best take care of the laboratory chimps now found in sanctuaries in the United States as well as monkeys and many other animals in zoos.
Unlike their captive counterparts, chimpanzees observed in sanctuaries or in the wild appear to age healthier because they remain active throughout their lives.
Photograph by Ronan Donovan
Similar insights have recently emerged from one of the world's best-known monkey populations.
Mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park in northwestern Rwanda have been studied since Dian Fossey began his research there in 1967.
From the very beginning, the researchers stored wild gorilla bodies that died of natural causes in special cages to protect them from scavengers and keep them safe for future study.
Since 2008, the National Geographic Society has supported the recovery and study of these remains.
a truly unique collection of over a hundred skeletons, says Johns Hopkins University anatomist Christopher Ruff; a set of data that allowed researchers to understand if the bones of gorillas weaken with let as they do in humans.
In a recent study on the signs of osteoporosis, a pathology that causes bone strength in humans to lose strength in aging, Ruff and colleagues found that although the cavities in gorillas' bones expand as they do in humans, the strength of their bones does not decrease as they progress. time and cases of fracture are rare.
The diet of gorillas based on calcium-rich plants could partially explain this phenomenon.
But the most significant factor, according to Ruff, again - physical activity.
Although mountain gorillas spend many hours a day sitting and eating in the position we are used to seeing on TV while we do the same, these animals get a lot of exercise moving up and down the steep slopes of the region.
This is critically important, says Ruff, because bones are constantly being remodeled in response to the forces they are subjected to.
Unlike mechanical parts, in our bones and muscles there are live tissues that allow their active reorganization and repair when they are used, and which on the contrary determine their degradation if we do not use them.
Either you use them or you lose them, adds Ruff.
The good news for those of us who are coming out of lockdown periods due to COVID-19 is that the reverse is also true and increasing exercise can still help us strengthen our weakened bodies.
Fortunately, many of the former laboratory chimps also have the opportunity to get their older muscles back into activity.
Hundreds of chimps from NIH-funded laboratories have been relocated to Chimp Haven, a sanctuary established in 2005 in Keithville, Louisiana, where retired monkeys have plenty of room to roam.
Chimp Haven's completely banned invasive animal research and requirements for scientists who want to study them are stringent.
In a statement sent to National Geographic, Chimp Haven workers said they approved numerous studies, most of which are observational studies, on the cognition, mobility and microbiome of the sanctuary's elderly chimpanzees.
Some of these research actions could one day also be useful for human health but the priority of the sanctuary at the moment is exclusively the well-being of these animals.

From Nationalgeographic