Copying
others can help young orangutans build a broad diet
Image courtesy
of Guilhem Duvot, SUAQ Project
Joel Kontinen
According to
evolution, orangutans are almost human, so they are able to copy some of the traits of
humans and from other apes. But animal intelligence is not something we would smirk
at. Some birds are intelligent than apes.
Young
orangutans acquire a substantial body of knowledge before they can survive
independently, which they must do by the time they are 8.5 years old. This
includes understanding what foods are safe to eat, where to fi intelligrent
than apes. nd them and how to process them in a rainforest offering hundreds of
food options of varying levels of accessibility – from easy-to-access leaves to
the more inaccessible but also manimal ore nutritious seeds at the heart of a
tough, spiny neesia fruit.
The
findings suggest that orangutans have different strategies for developing broad
survival skills, says Revathe Thillaikumar at the Max Planck Institute of
Animal Behavior in Germany.
Scientists
already know that orangutans can acquire this knowledge both by observing their
mothers and other individuals in their social circle – a process known as
social learning – and by exploring entirely on their own without any input from
others, which is known as individual learning. But how these two forms of
learning work together – and how they affect what orangutans learn to eat
before becoming independent – hasn’t been clear.
To find
out, Thillaikumar and her colleagues analysed nearly 7000 instances of learning
recorded during more than 1700 hours of observations of wild Sumatran
orangutans at Suaq Balimbing, a research station in Indonesia.
Youngsters
who learned by watching others also tended to continue manipulating new objects
or trying new foods for about 145 minutes after they had closely observed
another orangutan. This activity is reminiscent of the way in which children
will spend time imitating an activity they have just seen demonstrated by an
adult, says Thillaikumar. “Yeah, it’s practice.”
Source:
Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2026
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