Every morning, the three chimpanzee keepers at the Maryland Zoo play a board game to decide what they do that day.

The team encircles a table and moves around 15 laminated paper chips, labeled with the chimpanzees’ names, to different sections of a hand-drawn board that mimics the layout of the ape enclosure at the zoo.

Keepers use this board to strategize troop interactions to prevent serious injuries, recreate their dynamics in the wildlife and help each chimpanzee meet their development goals.

Playing the board game is more systematic than rolling a die.

The keepers track the number of days a chimpanzee is spending with all the individuals that they think are important for the chimpanzees to meet their social goals, such as selecting the troop’s alpha.

In the wild, throughout the day chimpanzees split into smaller groups and then come back together. Researchers call this pattern “fission-fusion,” and zookeepers try to mimic those dynamics in the captive chimpanzees’ social system, said Mike Evitts, the zoo’s spokesperson.

For example, if one day they noticed that two chimpanzees are not getting along and predict that they might have a serious altercation, they separate them in different locations the next day.

“Chimps solve pretty much all of their problems through aggression, so fighting is very normal. But they’re also very smart. They all have trained behaviors where we can check out their body presentations and they will let us tend to their wounds, clean them,” said Ruth Collier, one of the keepers who has worked with the chimpanzee troop for five years.

The keepers said they let the chimpanzees fight for the most part because afterward the chimps reassure one another, an important behavior for them to develop.

“It’s a lot of just grabbing and screaming and slapping, not anything too serious,” said Lulu Cardillo, another keeper who has been working with the troop for 1 1/2 years.

One of the few times keepers decide to immediately intervene is when a baby is involved in a fight, she said.

The zookeepers say they get emotionally invested in the job, in part because the chimpanzees seek out bonding opportunities with humans. Their human-like facial expressions also create “natural empathy” for them, Evitts said.

“At times, their behaviors and their dynamics can be so volatile that you put everything you have into this job and in making sure that they’re doing well,” said Carter Marsh, who has been working with the troop for four months. “Of course, we’re going to do everything in our power, but sometimes there’s just things that are out of your control. Coping with that, I think, is what I call the hardest part of the job.”

The team is so close to the animals that Collier can recognize which chimpanzees are in a fight just from the sound of their screaming coming through the doors.

Training the chimpanzees, especially babies, is rewarding because you can see how quickly they pick things up and watch them use the newly learned behaviors, Collier said.

“When you have a really good day where maybe the animal actually completes the behavior, for the person working on it for months, it’s like really rewarding to know ... that you accomplished something.”

Keepers typically run two training sessions a day to help the chimps practice important behaviors, from simple requests to check different body parts to more difficult ones such as how to behave during a cardiogram. The keepers reward them with pieces of fruits and vegetables.

Chimpanzees are also given enrichment activities such as painting and playing with a puzzle feeder and toys.

Keepers sometimes use rods and other tools to make contact with the animals. But for the most part, they rely on clickers and verbal and hand cues to communicate.

They also have to help some chimpanzees unlearn what they know. Jack and Louie, two of the chimpanzees brought to the zoo from the entertainment industry, are being trained to drop the human behavior they picked up, so they fit into the troop dynamics.

On June 10, the youngest chimpanzee of the troop was born. The mother, Rozi, was in labor for seven hours, making it a long, tense day for the keepers, who were just watching and waiting to intervene if needed.

After the birth, the keepers noticed that the baby wasn’t nursing well and they weren’t sure how much milk was being provided to her, so they had to intervene and separate the baby from the mom. They brought in other teams, like veterinary staff, to help.

They also have a network of chimpanzee management programs they can tap for resources, Evitts said.

Cardillo, who previously worked with orangutans, always wanted to work with chimpanzees because of their “intelligence and intriguing social dynamics.”

“My first day down in the building, Jack [one of the male chimpanzees in the group] threw mulch at me. I was like, well, this sounds good,” she said. “The social behavior between them [chimpanzees] is very different than orangutans, so I had to learn what reassurance looks like and what is concerning and what isn’t. It was and it’s still a long learning process, but it has been very fun.”