Orangutan mothers help offspring to learn
Last edited Mon Jan 3, 2022, 02:27 AM - Edit history (1)
Orangutan mothers actively involved in their offspring’s skill learning
Date:
December 8, 2021
Source:
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
When it comes to motherhood, orangutans are animals of distinction. An orangutan mother will stay in close contact with her baby for up to nine years -- longer than almost all mammals other than humans. Much like humans, orangutans rely on their mothers to learn life skills -- such as what to eat and where to find it -- before they finally reach independence almost a decade after birth. But unlike humans, orangutan mothers were not known to participate in their offspring's learning; behaving as passive role models rather than active teachers. That is, until a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany, uncovered the first evidence yet of active involvement by orangutan mothers in their offspring's skill learning. When orangutan mothers are foraging, they tailor their behavior to match the age and abilities of their offspring, thereby helping their young to socially learn new skills. The study raises the possibility that orangutans perform teaching -- a behavior that's rare among animals -- and sheds light on the factors that led to the evolution of teaching in humans.
The team studied how immature orangutans learn foraging skills. During the eight to nine year weaning period -- one of the longest periods of nutritional dependency in any mammal -- immatures must learn how to recognize and process more than 200 food items, many of which require several steps before they can be eaten. Easy-to-eat flowers and leaves require no processing, for example, whereas bark must be loosened from the tree and scraped with the teeth to remove the nutritional parts. The most difficult foods require tools, such as sticks that are converted into brushes for excavating honey from bee hives.
How they learn such complex foraging skills, according to previous studies, is by watching their mothers. Immatures will watch or "peer" at their mother when she is eating, especially when the food is hard to process. They will also beg or "solicit" food that the mother is eating, usually by attempting to grab the item out of her hands. But a mystery remained: why was the learning process one sided?
"It was puzzling that mothers always seemed so passive during these feeding interactions," says Caroline Schuppli, from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, who led the study. "Mothers have so much time with their offspring, and maintain such a close connection, but they never appeared to be actively involved in the skill acquisition of their young." The mystery was compounded by a lack of data. "Past studies had always examined skill learning from the point of view of the offspring," says Schuppli, "so we didn't know the role of the role model."
More:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/12/211208123415.htm
On edit, adding San Diego Zoo live cam featuring Orangutans, and Siamangs:
https://zoo.sandiegozoo.org/cams/ape-cam