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Young orangutans are very similar to small children: cute, affectionate, cute. But unlike human children, they don’t whine or argue when their mothers say no.
Orangutan mothers teach their cubs to forage, adjusting their tactics according to the age of the child and the complexity of the foraging technique. And they know exactly when a child is old enough to know better.
a new ResearchPublished this month in Scientific Reports, it describes 21 young orangutans living with their mother in a forest on the west coast of Aceh State in Sumatra. The researchers recorded 1,390 cases of children demanding food from their mothers, often simply by snatching them from their mothers’ hands. Mothers tolerate it – but only up to a point.
“No one has done much work on this, and no one has such data for Sumatran orangutans,” said David P. Watts, a professor of anthropology at Yale who has published widely on primate behavior but was not involved in this study. “The issue of how young primates learn what to eat – humans haven’t studied much.”
Orangutans stay with their mothers for eight or nine years, longer than almost any other mammal except humans. But time is not wasted: During this time, they learn to recognize, collect and process more than 200 food items.
Foods such as leaves and flowers are easy to find and eat. But for most fruits, for the bulk of their diet, orangutans need to know when they are ripe, which parts are edible, and how to remove them. And some foods involve using tools: Extracting honey from a hive, for example, requires a lot of practice to perfect the selection and design of a suitable stick and the skill to use it.
An orangutan is 8 years old before he establishes the basics for feeding himself, and 12 years old before he masters the most complex foraging and preparation techniques.
The researchers found that the older the child and the easier the food was to find and prepare, the less willing mothers were to share. Mothers allow younger children to have almost any food and even older children to have hard-to-find food. But if an older child – easy to find and eat – tries to grab the flowers, he won’t let it, in effect telling the child that he is old enough to find his own flowers.
The best and rarest foods – the meat of small primates, squirrels and civets, which orangutans sometimes prey on – are willingly shared with children of all ages.
Orangutan mothers are patient, and young orangutans are generally docile and docile. If a mother does not want to share, she turns away or is in a position where the child cannot reach food. No slapping, no shouting, no drama – but the younger one gets the message.
“We know that humans and orangutans are role models who adjust their behavior to the needs of students,” said Caroline Schuppli, lead author of the study. “In humans, adults do this proactively; in the orange, the initiative comes from the child – they have to ask for the food.”
Research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany. Schuppli said that human children are surrounded by not only parents, but also extended families and enthusiastic teachers, an entire education system based mainly on active teaching. .
“If you think about what a child needs to learn – it’s far beyond their imagination, beyond what they might actively want,” he said. “But it’s a little simpler with orangutans.”
Are some orangutans better teachers than others? Nobody knows.
Dr. “We need to show that some orangutan mothers have children who learn faster,” Schuppli said. “Does her children learn faster if a mother shares more? We don’t know. We don’t have the right type of data to test if that’s the case.”
In any animal research, and perhaps particularly primates, there is a danger of attributing human traits or behaviors to animals without good evidence. Dr. Schuppli tries to resist this urge.
“The data we collect is descriptive first and interpretation comes later,” he said. “We analyze data based on our hypotheses. But every great ape researcher has moments when he relates what he sees to human behavior.”
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