Ai (Chimpanzee)

Ai is a female chimpanzee who has been the research partner of Prof. Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University, Japan, for more than four decades. Ai has participated in many different cognitive tasks over the years, allowing researchers to compare her performance to that of human subjects, under the umbrella of comparative cognitive science.

Ai is a West African chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus), a subspecies distributed across several countries including Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. She is thought to have been born somewhere in West Africa around November 1976. She was likely separated from her mother and shipped by an animal dealer from Monrovia, Liberia, to Japan. Japan only ratified CITES, the convention prohibiting the international trade of endangered species, in 1980; thus in the 1970s, it was still legal to import chimpanzees from the wild. Nonetheless, this does not diminish the distressing history of wild chimpanzees being caught and sold to zoos and...