Primate Observation Essay

The two primates I chose to observe were chimpanzees and orangutans. I had no particular reason for choosing these particular primates except for the fact that they were easier for me to access. I first observed the chimpanzees on April 23rd. I was able to do both a group and focus observation on the chimpanzees. I chose to fill out the quantitative observation form on a focused observation because I wanted to focus on a single chimpanzee performing certain behaviors over a group. I found a lone chimpanzee and observed it walking around, playing, and scratching itself. I payed close attention to it’s form of locomotion, knuckle-walking. This chimpanzee would occasionally stand on it’s two feet, however, I noticed that even standing up, its back was slightly curved and it would go down on its …show more content…
I thought these were all ordinary behaviors to be expected in a chimpanzee, especially one held in captivity. For the qualitative observation, I chose to perform a focused observation. I chose this because I wanted to have detailed observations on a group of chimpanzees. In the group I observed, there were three chimpanzees. Their physical apperance was very similar to each other except for one that was slightly larger than the other two which led me to believe that it was male and the smaller two were females. I found it interesting that once the chimpanzees were joined in a group, there wasn’t much interaction between the three of them. I assumed that they would interact much more with each other than they did. Also, these chimpanzees appeared to be lethargic which I attributed to the warm weather. Apart from this, I did not notice any behaviors that I deemed to be out of the ordinary. I observed the orangutans on May 2nd. This time, I conducted both my quantitative and qualitative observations on group. The group consisted of an adult and a juvenile