John Mitani spent 85 months — roughly seven years — hiking the forests of Ngogo in Uganda's Kibale national park, building one of the most consequential long-term primate research projects on Earth. Co-founded in 1995 with Yale primatologist David Watts on a $500,000 NSF grant, the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project tracked nearly 200 chimps living in the largest known troop, producing findings that reshaped primatology. Now the Trump administration's proposed 2027 budget would eliminate the NSF division that funds it. The project's crown finding — published this April in Science — documents what may be the first observed civil war among wild chimpanzees. Beginning in 2015, a once-unified group fractured into two warring factions. By 2018 the split was complete. Nine males and 19 infants have been killed. A companion study in PNAS found that female fertility doubled and offspring survival increased substantially during the conflict, an unexpected demographic consequence of lethal aggression. Ngogo's earlier discoveries were already significant. Researchers documented the lowest mortality ever recorded for a wild chimp population, suggesting that habitat quality could push life expectancy close to that of human hunter-gatherers. They demonstrated that unrelated males could form strong alliances and cooperate, overturning the kin-selection orthodoxy. They showed that hunting and meat-eating served social bonding functions, not just nutritional ones. Mitani took more than a decade to write the civil war paper. He describes being "in denial" about the split and finding each return visit increasingly difficult as killings continued. He pushes back firmly against extrapolating from chimp violence to human evolutionary propensity, noting that bonobos — equally close relatives — show no such behavior. "If there is one thing I've learned from studying chimps all these years, it is that they are not us." The practical conservation case is straightforward: researcher presence at Ngogo over decades has helped protect these populations. Teams work with Uganda's wildlife authority to remove snares set for other game that occasionally trap chimps. The project is one of just 12 long-term wild chimpanzee studies worldwide — a vanishingly small scientific infrastructure that cannot be rebuilt once lost. The funding threat is specific. The Ngogo project draws primarily from the NSF's behavioral and cognitive sciences division. Under the proposed 2027 budget, that division faces elimination. Mitani, now 72 and splitting time between Michigan and Arizona, frames this bluntly: "This is one of the reasons I am so concerned about the war on science and truth in this country." The chimps' stories, he says, are far from fully told. What makes Ngogo irreplaceable is time. Thirty years of continuous observation on 200 individuals cannot be restarted. The habituation process alone — getting chimps comfortable with human observers — took years. The civil war data is meaningful precisely because it sits atop two decades of baseline behavioral records. Cutting the funding doesn't pause the science; it destroys the instrument.
