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Chimpanzees, already contaminated by corn treated with dangerous phytosanitary products, are today victims of another pollution. Plastic bottles on the side of the roads are suspected of being the cause… Extract from the magazine “1:15 p.m. on Saturday” of January 15, 2022.
French primatologist Sabrina Krief has been fighting for more than twenty years to preserve a community of chimpanzees in the rainforest of Uganda. That day, accompanied by a specialist in endocrine disruptors, she placed air sensors along the new road that crosses the nature reserve. The trained veterinarian wants to collect pollutants from exhaust gases suspected in primate malformations.
The guards recruited for this mission will watch day and night over these precious samples. And several months after the installation of the device, the sensors have spoken: the road pollution is too weak to be responsible for the malformations… but the road would be at the origin of another, more unexpected pollution. And it is by collecting sixty-ten hairs in the nests of chimpanzees that the scientist, professor at the National Museum of Natural History, has made a disturbing discovery…
“We find bisphenol A and bisphenol S”
Analysis of the samples reveals plastic pollution. In question, the bottles strewing the edge of the road. The team of this holder of a doctorate in ecology and chemistry of natural substances picked up 5,000 over five kilometres! “In these hairs, we find bisphenol A and bisphenol S, one of the traces of plastic pollutants”, explains to the magazine “1:15 p.m. on Saturday” (replay) the one who launched, with her husband the photographer Jean-Michel Krief, the Great Ape Conservation Project (PCGS).
“It’s still quite a mystery to us… she notes. Chimpanzees often eat along the road, as they are attracted to these grassy areas. And even if they mainly like fruit, they also eat this grass on the ground, which may be contaminated by plastic bottles. It’s quite incredible to think that chimpanzees are exposed in the heart of the rainforest, not only to pesticides but also to plastic pollution that we never thought would reach into the heart of this forest. ” In this place which seemed preserved, the presence of the man became a threat for the chimpanzees.
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