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For breeding facilities
Management and disclosure of information
Information, including the number of chimpanzees bred in Japan, has been annually examined in the form of a questionnaire survey and is managed by coordinators of the Japanese Association of Zoos and Aquariums (the person in charge of chimpanzees: Koichiro Yoshiwara, Tama Zoological Park).
Furthermore, to assist the above investigation, GAIN will collect and manage individual-related information, such as movement history, medical history, results of body measurement, genetic information, and data including photographs, and also information on the environment surrounding chimpanzees, such as group composition, drawings of breeding facilities, and the names of persons in charge of breeding.
The information will be disclosed to cooperative breeding facilities in an easy-to-understand form, using the World Wide Web or the like.
The information, currently held by zoos in Japan, will be valuable not only for better breeding of chimpanzees but also for promotion* of research using chimpanzees and with respect to subspecies and male excess problems*.
To collect and update useful information, researchers will directly visit zoos to perform interview surveys in addition to questionnaire surveys.
*Since chimpanzees are the animals that are genetically closest to humans, they are used for a very wide range of research themes from genetics to cognitive behavior. GAIN will allow the use chimpanzees for “noninvasive experiments,” which have been approved by an ethics committee, such as behavioral observations or body hair collection, and coordinate research designed to understand chimpanzees and humans.
*In Japan, chimpanzees belonging to three subspecies have been mixed in breeding, and an environment to protect genuine subspecies --except for subspecies verus, to which more than 70% of all chimpanzees belong-- has not been appropriately established. Since coordination among breeding facilities is difficult to achieve, the propagation is biased toward to particular males and the number of excess males increases.
