Chimpanzees appear to be the biggest daredevils when they’re infants. Humans tend to take more chances and put themselves in the most danger in adolescence, so the expectation has been that chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), among our closest evolutionary cousins, follow a similar pattern. But undergraduate researcher Bryce Murray’s observations of young chimps — and especially infants — from video shot at the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Uganda didn’t quite jibe with that assumption, according to research published Jan. 16 in the journal iScience. “I kept seeing these behaviors that seemed very risky,” Murray, the study’s lead author and a recent graduate from the University of Michigan in the U.S., told Mongabay. Young chimps, he noticed, frequently leaped through tree branches or dropped from them, flying freely through the air without holding onto anything. An adult female chimpanzee leaping in the forest at Ngogo Chimpanzee Project. Image by Murray et al., 2026 (CC-BY-NC-ND). Chimpanzees are well-adapted to life in the trees, picking up the ability to climb and swing through them as early as 2 years old. That’s an important skill, as high branches offer safety and provide the fruit that makes up the bulk of their diet. Still, it’s hard not to ascribe a bit of ebullience to their looping swings through the canopy. But moving around 10 meters (33 feet) or more above the ground can also be dangerous, particularly in the “free flight” incidents that caught Murray’s attention. One study found that around a third of chimp skeletons…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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