Chimpanzee Culture & Intelligence

[sunsplash1]

It's Gibbons with nuclear weapons that give me the willies...

 

[Timble2]

And you all thought that Planet of the Apes was fantasy....

 

[ramonmercado]

Score One for the Sociable Ape
By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News
8 March 2007

Chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest primate relatives, but the two apes have very different personalities. While primatologists have often noted nasty, competitive behavior among power-hungry chimps, bonobos have a reputation as free-loving peaceniks. Now, a behavioral study that directly compares the two apes suggests that the bonobos' more cordial nature enables them to cooperate more successfully than chimps in some situations.
Most researchers believe that humans shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos between 5 million and 7 million years ago (for a different take, see ScienceNOW, 27 February). Both of these apes may have something to tell us about the evolution of human behavior, yet most research has focused on chimps, in large part because bonobos are endangered--perhaps as few as 10,000 remain. In the new study, researchers worked with bonobos at a sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo and with chimps at a Ugandan sanctuary.

The different natures of the two apes became clear when the researchers, led by Brian Hare, a biological anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, presented pairs of bonobos and pairs of chimps with plates of fruit. Bonobo pairs reacted by playing with each other and even rubbing genitals--a frequent stress-reliever in bonobo society. They also shared the bounty more often than not. Chimps, on the other hand, generally avoided their partner and shared food less than half of the time.

Next, the researchers tested both apes on a cooperation task they'd used previously with chimps, putting pairs of animals in an enclosure and placing a fruit-laden platform just outside. The only way to bring the food within reach was to simultaneously pull two ropes connected to the ends of the platform, but the ropes were too far apart for one animal to reach on its own (ScienceNOW, 2 March 2006). Both chimps and bonobos teamed up with their cagemate to pull the ropes when the fruit was cut up into easily sharable pieces, the researchers found. But when the food was cut into big chunks, bonobos cooperated to haul in the fruit more often than chimps did. And when the chimps did cooperate, they almost always adopted a winner-take-all mentality, with one animal hogging the entire bounty, the researchers report online today in Current Biology. Because bonobos are more tolerant of each other and more willing to share, they're able to cooperate more effectively than chimps in some situations, the researchers conclude.

The findings "open a bit of a door on the bonobo mind that we didn't have before," says Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Although field studies have found little evidence of cooperative behavior in wild bonobos, it may simply be that their lush forest habitat provides enough easily accessible food that teamwork isn't necessary, de Waal says. We often look to chimps for clues to human behavior, he notes, but "this study shows another side to our primate ancestry."

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/co ... 2007/308/2

 

[rynner2]

Chimps knocked off top of the IQ tree
Jonathan Leake and Roger Dobson

ORANG-UTANS have been named as the world’s most intelligent animal in a study that places them above chimpanzees and gorillas, the species traditionally considered closest to humans.

The study found that out of 25 species of primate, orang-utans had developed the greatest power to learn and to solve problems.

The controversial findings challenge the widespread belief that chimpanzees are the closest to humans in brainpower. They also suggest that the ancestry of orang-utans and humans may be more closely entwined than had been thought.

“It appears the orang-utan may possess a privileged status among human kindred,” said James Lee, the Harvard University psychologist behind the research. “It is even possible that an orang-utan-like forager occupied a pivotal link in the chain of descent leading to man.”

Both orang-utans and chimpanzees share about 96% of their DNA with humans, although molecular studies suggest that chimpanzees are more closely related.

The study comes at a time when orang-utans are endangered as never before. Once widespread throughout the forests of Asia, they are now confined to just two islands, Sumatra and Borneo, and are highly endangered as a result of habitat loss and poaching.

Lee’s work involved collating a series of separate studies into the intelligence of different primate species. However, his research first had to overcome a much greater hurdle: would it be possible to compare different species of primates at all?

Spider monkeys, for example, have developed brains to cope with a fast-moving life in the tree tops, while slow lorises are small and leisurely nocturnal hunters.

The conventional belief is that comparing the intelligence of different species is meaningless because separate evolution over millions of years will have given them very different brains.

Lee, a junior psychology researcher at Harvard, found that in primates, at least, different rules seem to apply — the development of one set of mental skills seems to prompt the primate brain to develop other mental abilities as well.

“A primate genus with a high rank in an experiment testing particular mental abilities appears to have high ranks in all of them,” said Lee.

He also found that the single most important factor in deciding a species’ intelligence was simply the size of its brain: “The correlation of brain size with mental ability found in humans appears to extend throughout the primate order.”

This “remarkable finding” suggests, he said, that all primate brains work in much the same way, however they have evolved, allowing comparisons between species.

Lee’s research threw up some other surprises, too. Gorillas, for example, emerged as less intelligent than spider monkeys while baboons, often considered relatively bright, were ranked 14th.

Recent field work by Carel van Schaik, a Dutch primatologist who is now at Duke University, North Carolina, appears to bear out Lee’s findings.

Studying orang-utans in Borneo, he found them capable of tasks well beyond chimpanzees’ abilities — such as using leaves to make rain hats and leakproof roofs over their sleeping nests. He also found that in some food-rich areas the creatures had developed a complex culture in which adults would teach youngsters how to make tools and find food.

He and Lee both suggest that the key factor in such developments is the orang-utans’ life-style, spent mostly in the tops of trees where there is little risk from predators. This has allowed them to establish long and settled lives similar to humans’ and also to develop culture and intelligence.

In his own research papers, Van Schaik has suggested that since the ancestors of modern orang-utans split from the human lineage about 15m years ago, the seeds of human culture must go back at least as far.

Chris Stringer, professor of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, agrees that the sociable lifestyles of primates are the driving force behind the development of intelligence. “Primates and early humans had not got the claws and teeth of predators so they had to rely on brainpower to communicate and protect themselves,” he said. “They are sociable creatures and living in small groups seems to have driven brain development.”

The idea that sociability and intelligence are linked is borne out by research into the relative brain power of diverse animal groups including cetaceans (whales and dolphins) and birds.

Dr Vincent Janik, of the sea mammal research unit at St Andrews University, said that some dolphin species had developed the ability to communicate far beyond that of great apes. “Dolphins have some abilities that great apes don’t have, such as copying new sounds. No primate apart from humans can do that,” he said.

Additional reporting: Max Colchester

Non-human primates in order of intelligence

1 Orange-utan

2 Chimpanzee

3 Spider monkey

4 Langur

5 Macaque

6 Mandrill

7 Guenon

8 Mangabey

9 Capuchin

10 Gibbon

11 Baboon

12 Woolly monkey

Chimps knocked off top of the IQ treeJonathan Leake and Roger Dobson
ORANG-UTANS have been named as the world’s most intelligent animal in a study that places them above chimpanzees and gorillas, the species traditionally considered closest to humans.

The study found that out of 25 species of primate, orang-utans had developed the greatest power to learn and to solve problems.

The controversial findings challenge the widespread belief that chimpanzees are the closest to humans in brainpower. They also suggest that the ancestry of orang-utans and humans may be more closely entwined than had been thought.

“It appears the orang-utan may possess a privileged status among human kindred,” said James Lee, the Harvard University psychologist behind the research. “It is even possible that an orang-utan-like forager occupied a pivotal link in the chain of descent leading to man.”

Both orang-utans and chimpanzees share about 96% of their DNA with humans, although molecular studies suggest that chimpanzees are more closely related.

The study comes at a time when orang-utans are endangered as never before. Once widespread throughout the forests of Asia, they are now confined to just two islands, Sumatra and Borneo, and are highly endangered as a result of habitat loss and poaching.

Lee’s work involved collating a series of separate studies into the intelligence of different primate species. However, his research first had to overcome a much greater hurdle: would it be possible to compare different species of primates at all?

Spider monkeys, for example, have developed brains to cope with a fast-moving life in the tree tops, while slow lorises are small and leisurely nocturnal hunters.

The conventional belief is that comparing the intelligence of different species is meaningless because separate evolution over millions of years will have given them very different brains.

Lee, a junior psychology researcher at Harvard, found that in primates, at least, different rules seem to apply — the development of one set of mental skills seems to prompt the primate brain to develop other mental abilities as well.

“A primate genus with a high rank in an experiment testing particular mental abilities appears to have high ranks in all of them,” said Lee.

He also found that the single most important factor in deciding a species’ intelligence was simply the size of its brain: “The correlation of brain size with mental ability found in humans appears to extend throughout the primate order.”

This “remarkable finding” suggests, he said, that all primate brains work in much the same way, however they have evolved, allowing comparisons between species.

Lee’s research threw up some other surprises, too. Gorillas, for example, emerged as less intelligent than spider monkeys while baboons, often considered relatively bright, were ranked 14th.

Recent field work by Carel van Schaik, a Dutch primatologist who is now at Duke University, North Carolina, appears to bear out Lee’s findings.

Studying orang-utans in Borneo, he found them capable of tasks well beyond chimpanzees’ abilities — such as using leaves to make rain hats and leakproof roofs over their sleeping nests. He also found that in some food-rich areas the creatures had developed a complex culture in which adults would teach youngsters how to make tools and find food.

He and Lee both suggest that the key factor in such developments is the orang-utans’ life-style, spent mostly in the tops of trees where there is little risk from predators. This has allowed them to establish long and settled lives similar to humans’ and also to develop culture and intelligence.

In his own research papers, Van Schaik has suggested that since the ancestors of modern orang-utans split from the human lineage about 15m years ago, the seeds of human culture must go back at least as far.

Chris Stringer, professor of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, agrees that the sociable lifestyles of primates are the driving force behind the development of intelligence. “Primates and early humans had not got the claws and teeth of predators so they had to rely on brainpower to communicate and protect themselves,” he said. “They are sociable creatures and living in small groups seems to have driven brain development.”

The idea that sociability and intelligence are linked is borne out by research into the relative brain power of diverse animal groups including cetaceans (whales and dolphins) and birds.

Dr Vincent Janik, of the sea mammal research unit at St Andrews University, said that some dolphin species had developed the ability to communicate far beyond that of great apes. “Dolphins have some abilities that great apes don’t have, such as copying new sounds. No primate apart from humans can do that,” he said.

Additional reporting: Max Colchester

Non-human primates in order of intelligence

1 Orange-utan

2 Chimpanzee

3 Spider monkey

4 Langur

5 Macaque

6 Mandrill

7 Guenon

8 Mangabey

9 Capuchin

10 Gibbon

11 Baboon

12 Woolly monkey

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 654998.ece

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

Chimps Spotted Using Caves, Like Early Humans

Charles Q. Choi
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com Wed Apr 11, 10:15 AM ET

Savannah chimpanzees, which can make weapons to hunt other primates for meat, can also seek refuge in caves, much like our earliest human ancestors.

New findings suggest the chimps apparently shelter themselves in caves to hide from the extreme African heat. The cave use was documented by visual observations and photographs.

Primatologist Jill Pruetz at Iowa State University in Ames and her colleagues research savannah chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus). These dwell in environs much like those from which humanity's ancestors are believed to have emerged.

Cool discovery

Specifically, the researchers investigated the Fongoli community of 35 savannah chimpanzees in southeastern Senegal, one of the hottest and driest habitats chimps live in today. Pruetz and her colleagues recently found that Fongoli chimps apparently could manufacture spears to hunt other primates, such as bushbabies.

Just finding the chimpanzees in their large, roughly 7,400-acre home range was very challenging at first, Pruetz recalled.

"Going for a week or 10 long days without seeing chimpanzees was normal at the beginning and, as you might imagine, very frustrating at times, especially during the dry season, when heat is such an issue for chimps and humans alike!" she told LiveScience.

The research into chimpanzees' possible use of caves began when Pruetz's field assistant Mboule Camara saw the apes coming from Sakoto cave, the largest cavern within the chimp's home range. The cave is more than 15 feet deep and located at the head of a shallow ravine that was formed through water runoff from a plateau.

To determine why they might use the cave, Pruetz recorded temperature data within the cave as well as at the different habitats the chimpanzees used, such as the woodlands and grasslands. She discovered that chimps most often use the stone cave as shelter during the hottest and driest times of the year, from October to May, findings detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Primates. It is the first study to document regular cave use by chimps.

Up to 10 degrees cooler

Between 2001 and 2004, average annual daily temperature within the cave was 75.5 degrees Fahrenheit, compared with 85.2 degrees in the woodland locales and 76.2 degrees in grassland areas, both located at the edge of the Sakoto ravine and roughly 100 feet from the cave. The grasslands were probably cooler due to wind, Pruetz said.

"They'll bring food in and eat it in there and groom. They sort of just hang out and relax," Pruetz said. The chimps apparently used the caves during the day and not at night.

Pruetz recalled talking at a meeting in Japan about chimps using caves.

"Everyone was amazed," she said. "They thought it was great and no one had ever heard of anything like it, except that Jane Goodall actually came up to me after the talk—I was very excited of course—and she said that she heard of an incident in Mali where someone was doing a chimp survey and they surprised a bunch of chimps coming out of a cave."

"But that was the only other instance that anyone, as far as I know, has ever heard of (chimps in caves)," Pruetz said. "And if Jane Goodall hasn't heard of it, then I assume it it's not known to science."

Chimp culture

Paleoanthropologist Adrienne Zihlman at the University of California at Santa Cruz told LiveScience: "These chimpanzees are dealing with conditions most chimpanzees don't have to deal with. They are giving a little window to some of the problems that have to be solved if you want to survive in the savannah, and are confronting the kinds of problems that our early human ancestors had to face."

Biologist Rob Shumaker at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa in Des Moines added, "These findings really point out the range of behavioral and cognitive flexibility that exists for chimpanzees."

"These results aren't seen at any other chimpanzee field site, stressing the idea that there's cultural variation between chimpanzees across sites," Shumaker told LiveScience. "They continue to surprise us and teach use new things."

Source

 

[Anome]

The irony is, of course, that the name for the chimpanzee is Pan Troglodytes, and until recently they weren't believed to actually be cave dwellers.

 

[ramonmercado]

Female chimps can become killers

Female chimps were previously thought to be less aggressive
Scientists in Scotland have discovered that female chimpanzees can be just as violent as their male counterparts.
The St Andrews University psychologists found examples of female chimps killing the offspring of incoming mothers, previously regarded as a male trait.

The Fife team has been studying chimps in the Budongo Forest, Uganda.

The researchers said only three previous instances of lethal aggression in wild female chimps had been documented in the past 50 years.

The belief was that male and females differed greatly in nature but the psychologists found that if the chimps' resources come under threat the females could become just as aggressive as males.

Our research shows that, under the right socio-ecological circumstances, chimp gender stereotypes collapse completely

Simon Townsend
St Andrews University

While observing chimps in the Sonso community, the researchers came across three examples of female apes killing the offspring of incoming mothers.

One attack was so violent that a baby chimp's head was bitten off.

Simon Townsend, who led the study, said: "It's true that males are much more often seen to engage in extreme physical violence than females, and this has led to the notion of violent and demonic males in contrast to quite peaceful females.

"However, our research shows that, under the right socio-ecological circumstances, these chimp gender stereotypes collapse completely.

"If their resources are under threat, females can become just as violently aggressive as males."

Similar behaviour

Similar behaviour was described by a leading primatologist in the 1970s, but her findings were later disregarded as inconsistent.

Mr Townsend said female aggression only occurred under specific circumstances.

He added that an increase of immigrant females entering the Sonso community had put pressure on food and mate resources, which had caused the violence.

"It is impossible to predict when another instance may occur," Mr Townsend said.

"However, we are very interested in keeping a close eye on levels of female aggression in the Sonso community, especially in the instances when new females attempt to immigrate."



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scot ... 656661.stm

 

[ramonmercado]

Chimps Not So Selfish After All
By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News
25 June 2007

Chimpanzees aren't known for their charity. Recent experiments with chimps have found that they're generally unwilling to deliver a snack to a fellow ape, even when there's no cost to themselves. A new study, however, breaks with those findings, demonstrating that our closest living relatives do show altruistic tendencies--at least sometimes.
In the wild, chimpanzees engage in apparent acts of kindness such as grooming and sharing food. But behavioral researchers have found little evidence of true altruism: helping an unrelated individual when there's no expectation of payback. For example, a recent study led by primatologist Joan Silk of the University of California, Los Angeles, gave chimps a choice between two levers: By pulling one, a chimp could earn a snack; by pulling the other, it could earn a snack for itself plus a bonus snack for a chimp in a nearby room. But the chimps pulled the levers randomly, showing little regard for their companion (ScienceNOW, 26 October 2005). A 2006 study led by psychologist Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, reported similarly inconsiderate behavior.

In the new experiments, Tomasello and postdoctoral fellow Felix Warneken tried a different setup. They placed one chimp in a room where it had a clear view of a tantalizing piece of watermelon or banana in a room next door. The door connecting the two rooms was chained shut. A second chimp, by itself in a third room with a view of the whole setup, could unlock the door by removing a peg to release the chain. Doing so would allow the first chimp to get the fruit. The potential benefactors unlocked the door almost 80% of the time, even though the fruity treat always went to the other chimp, Warneken and Tomasello report in the July issue of PLoS Biology. The researchers argue that their findings suggest that altruistic behavior is not unique to humans, as the previous work might have suggested.

"I think it's a great experiment," says Silk. "It raises really interesting questions about the circumstances in which chimps are motivated to provide help to others." For example, Silk suspects that when chimps are eating or expect to eat, the impulse to help others may go out the window. She points out that unlike the unhelpful chimps in previous experiments, the benefactors in the new study had no chance of getting food themselves. Warneken agrees that the expectation of food puts chimps "in a different mindset." He thinks another factor might be that the recipient chimps in his experiment pushed and banged on the door, making it clear they needed help.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/co ... 2007/625/1

 

[ramonmercado]

An interesting addition to the debate.

Do chimps have culture?
What can we learn from the fact that chimps can teach each other?By Bob Grant


Non-chimp animal culture

An entourage of subordinate chimps is gathered eagerly around Steward, the big alpha-male chimpanzee, at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center outside of Atlanta. They're watching Steward brandish a Plexiglas stick at an oblong polycarbonate box sitting behind a wide mesh fence - a rudimentary candy vending machine. As the subordinates look on, he liberates M&M after M&M from the contraption - called Pan-pipes after the chimpanzee genus, Pan - designed to make chimps work for their treats.

He's doing so by raising an internal trap door with the Plexiglas stick. In the upper pipe on the Pan-pipes is a piece of candy, trapped by a blockage (see first image below). Once the blockage is removed, the candy can roll into the lower pipe and down a chute into a waiting chimp's hand. In this case, Steward is using a technique called the lift, in which he raises a T-shaped flange attached to an internal trap door. The other technique, called the poke, pushes treats from the Pan-pipes with the plastic stick tool. They're equally effective.

Victoria Horner, a postdoc at Yerkes' Living Links Center, keeps the Pan-pipes stocked with fresh M&Ms. A steady rhythm develops: the click of Horner introducing an M&M into the back of the Pan-pipes, the clunk of Steward lifting the internal gate, and the tinkle of the treat rolling down the shoot into his hand. Steward scores at least a dozen M&Ms. His entourage looks on, rapt but patient.

Tool use is well documented in both wild and captive chimpanzees. So, the fact that Steward can operate the Pan-pipes using a simple tool isn't groundbreaking. What is remarkable, however, is how Steward obtained this skill. His human caretakers didn't teach him this relatively complex behavior, nor did he figure out the lift on his own. Steward learned the secret of the Pan-pipes from one of the very chimps huddled around him: alpha-female Ericka.

Most of the subordinate chimps surrounding him are expert lifters as well. They learned the lift after Horner taught Ericka the behavior, in collaboration with Andrew Whiten, a psychologist at Scotland's University of St. Andrews, and Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Yerkes. Horner also taught a high-ranking female in another group of Yerkes chimps to use the poke technique to push treats from the Pan-pipes. It has been six months since Steward has seen the Pan-pipes, and he's sticking with lifting.

"Imagine what the poke-group looks like, and then you've got your two cultures," says Horner, watching Steward. "I think these guys are very representative of chimps in the wild." She adds, "They're doing things that nobody thought that they could, and they're learning with this high fidelity."

The Yerkes chimps may be doing an unprecedented, or at least undocumented, thing by sharing and maintaining specific behaviors within social groups. Some researchers say that's evidence of culture among apes. But is it?

Jane Goodall, the renowned primatologist, was one of the first scientists to rigorously draw a link between human and chimp behavior when she reported, in a 1964 Nature paper,1 the manufacture of twig tools used for termite foraging in Tanzanian chimpanzees. Then in the 1970s, William McGrew and Caroline Tutin noted a curious hand-clasp (see Primate customs ) performed during grooming bouts in one Tanzanian chimpanzee community. That behavior hadn't been seen in Goodall's Gombe Stream Reserve chimps living only 170 km to the north and separated by recently deforested tracts. Because both the hand-claspers and the Gombe chimps were of the same subspecies, Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii, and because they inhabited similar ecologic niches, McGrew and Tutin wrote in a 1978 Man paper,2 that the grooming hand-clasp was a "social custom."

"In Science we push limits, you know? We say, 'Let's call it culture because that's what we think it is,' and then others try to debunk it."
-Frans de Waal
It was the most robust evidence yet for an established chimpanzee behavior that was not obviously mediated by genetic or ecologic differences between chimpanzee groups. It was also a seminal moment for the field of "cultural primatology."

In the decades of field observation that followed, researchers described more behaviors that seemed to be transmitted socially through chimpanzee populations. Descriptions of regionally varying behaviors, such as nut cracking and using bunches of leaves as sponges to sop up water from tree hollows or as napkins to clean muddy feet, built the case for a cultural dimension to wild chimpanzee life.

This accumulation of observations culminated in a 1999 Nature paper3 in which Whiten and a collection of other leading field primatologists compiled decades of field data to identify 39 behaviors, or "traditions," that vary across African chimpanzee communities in tell-tale patterns. They wrote that those patterns "resemble those in human societies."

The authors of the paper didn't go as far as to propose the exact mechanism by which these traditions were maintained and spread through chimp communities, but they did suggest that some form of cultural or social transmission was likely at play. And, they equated the resulting patterns in chimpanzee behavioral traditions to what humans call culture. "It was the first time that the claim was made that one could distinguish different [chimpanzee] communities on the basis of a whole rich and complex profile of multiple traditions," says Whiten, "which I think then holds up a mirror to what we think of as culture in the human case."

Not everyone agrees, however, that chimpanzee behavior can be framed in the same context as human culture. The paper's premise sparked a heated debate that continues today. "If you want to call what chimpanzees have culture, then we'll have to find a new word for what it is that humans have, because they're just totally different from each other," says Bennett Galef, former president of the Animal Behavior Society. "It's reflected in the fact that we're building cathedrals and walking on the moon, and they still sit naked in the rain."

Galef, a psychologist at McMaster University in Canada who has studied social learning's role in the behaviors of animals such as Norway rats and Japanese quail, says that field primatologists prematurely affixed the term culture to the behavioral patterns they observed in wild chimpanzees. But de Waal, who was not an author on the 1999 Nature paper, defends the claim. "In science we push limits, you know? We say, 'Let's call it culture because that's what we think it is,' and then others can try to debunk it," de Waal says. "You can call it provocative."

And provoke it does. The claim of chimpanzee culture fuels arguments from those who consider human culture a distinct and unparalleled evolutionary advance. The basis for this contention is twofold: One is a disagreement over definitions, and the other is a perceived lack of empirical data supporting chimpanzee culture.

Defining the word culture becomes problematic when scientists from anthropologists and sociologists to psychologists and primatologists throw their hats into the ring. Primatologists tend to focus on a pared-down definition of culture, emphasizing a fundamentally biological approach, while social scientists tend to define the term using specific mechanisms of cultural acquisition and transmission, such as language, teaching, or symbolic mediation.

University of Chicago anthropologist Russell Tuttle, for example, stresses symbolism as a defining aspect of culture. He suggests that chimpanzee behaviors, such as nut cracking, should not be called cultural until their inherent symbolism can be demonstrated. "If they were doing it because that rock and that nut and anvil represented something," says Tuttle, "then it would be culture."

Horner, however, defines culture simply as the "transmission of behavior by nongenetic means." This would make nut cracking, if it is indeed learned socially in wild chimps, a cultural behavior. de Waal shares Horner's more inclusive definition, saying that it places chimpanzees on the same cultural continuum as human beings. "You can emphasize the unique parts, but I still think that essentially human culture would fall under what we define as culture, which is behavior that is socially transmitted," he says. "I think it's based on the same learning mechanisms (that you learn from others in social learning), and that it has the same results - that groups do different things. In humans we definitely call that cultural variation."


A chimp demonstrates the lift technique used by Steward and his group at Yerkes to release food rewards from Pan-pipes.

Alan Male / AA Reps Inc.

Tuttle and Galef both say that they avoid using the word "culture" to describe chimpanzee behavior. "Why in the world do you have to insist that whatever it is that chimpanzees do is called culture?" asks Galef. "I'm perfectly happy to call it tradition in those cases where it seems likely that it's been learned socially." Tuttle shares Galef's sentiment. "You want to call it culture? Fine," he says. "I'll call it learned behavior patterns."

Semantics aside, critics of Whiten et al.'s 1999 Nature paper also argue that observational evidence was too scant at that time to support the claim that chimpanzees were sharing and maintaining behaviors as part of a culture. "I personally believe that one should be fairly conservative in attributing human-like properties to animals," says Galef. "I don't mean to be overly critical, but the primatologists have a way of claiming that they've shown something which they haven't yet shown, and then spend years collecting data that suggested they were right in the first place."

Due to the inherent limits of chimpanzee field observation, primatologists could provide little more than circumstantial evidence that behavioral patterns among wild chimp communities resulted from social transmission. They could not easily observe this transmission at work, pinpoint the mechanisms mediating the transmission, or conduct active experiments that might elucidate these facets of chimpanzee behavior.

For example, transplant experiments, in which a chimp from one community is moved to another community with a different set of traditions, are virtually impossible to conduct due to ethical and logistical considerations and the nature of chimpanzee intergroup aggression. This left a gap between documenting sets of wild chimpanzee traditions that resembled cultures and providing evidence that these traditions were passed along socially, and not the result of undetected genetic or ecologic differences.

Given the limitations of field-based experimentation, some focus shifted to captive chimpanzee groups, like Steward's, to elucidate fundamental facets of chimpanzee behavior and provide convincing experimental evidence for the assertion that chimps do indeed have the capacity to develop distinct cultures. Enter the Pan-pipes study, published in Nature in 2005.4

Horner, Whiten, and de Waal, the authors of the study, wanted to use a scenario that tracked socially transmitted behavioral variation and approximated natural foraging. They came up with the Pan-pipes because it's close to tasks such as using a stick to fish for ants, which wild chimps perform with slight variations in technique between groups.

In the Pan-pipes study, while Steward and Ericka's group was learning to lift the Pan-pipes, Yerkes' other chimp group was learning to poke treats from the apparatus (Kix cereal, not M&Ms, was used in the actual study). Horner trained Georgia, a high-ranking female in the poke group, who then demonstrated the behavior for the chimps in her group. It spread among them just as the lift behavior had through Steward's group. Though in both the lift and poke groups some individuals experimented with the alternate technique, the researchers found a high fidelity for the specific behavior each group learned from their respective models. Individuals who did poke among lifters or lift among pokers tended to revert back to the dominant group behavior when the chimps were retested with the Pan-pipes two months after their initial exposure.

A similar experiment,5 published earlier this year, also tracked an introduced behavior as it diffused through chimp groups. In this study, Yerkes' two chimp groups learned that depositing tokens in receptacles resulted in food rewards. As in the Pan-pipes study, the groups learned different, but equally effective, reward-garnering tactics. The chimps received a treat by depositing tokens in either blue or white garbage cans. While Georgia showed her group how to get treats by dropping tokens in the blue garbage can, Ericka was demonstrating how putting tokens in the white garbage can could yield the same reward. Though all chimps were rewarded for placing a token in either receptacle, the two groups again showed an overwhelming tendency to stick to the specific behavior that was originally seeded in their community.

According to de Waal, the fidelity for socially entrained behaviors shown in these two experiments represents a previously undemonstrated propensity for conformity in chimps, which may be related to a major driver of human culture: the urge to fit in. Such results expand the developing picture of chimpanzee social capabilities and bolster the claims of field primatologists studying chimpanzee culture. "Ten years ago, when we started, the prevalent opinion was that chimps have no imitation and have very limited capacities for social learning. I think what we have shown is that you can actually artificially introduce cultures and you get reliable transmission. So this whole story about chimpanzees being limited in that regard, I think we can say, has been disproved," he says. "I think that's a very strong finding."

"We're building cathedrals and walking on the moon, and they still sit nakedin the rain."
-Bennett Galef
Owing to its experimental design, the token study provided an additional insight into the chimpanzee's capacity for culture. Unlike the Pan-pipes experiment, which tracked a behavior that directly resulted in a food reward, the token study examined a behavior that was not, in and of itself, directly tied to getting a treat. While the Pan-pipes can be viewed as an artificial termite mound, the behavior explored in the token study is closer to arbitrary human behaviors such as working for a paycheck that one uses to buy groceries.

Kristin Bonnie, a PhD student in de Waal's group and lead author of the token study, says that depositing tokens into a garbage can for a food reward parallels seemingly arbitrary wild chimpanzee behaviors. Some wild chimps, for example, noisily tear leaves between their teeth as a way to initiate sex or play with a companion. "We've seen those observations in the wild. We assume that they're learned through social learning in some way, but it's hard to observe social learning in the wild," Bonnie says. "This study really built off of that to show that they can learn to do things with objects that are seemingly arbitrary and have no meaning until somebody does something with it to give it a meaning."

Bonnie says that chimps participating in her token study displayed the kind of learning that many feel is essential to the development and spread of culture in chimps or in humans. "It's complex learning because they have to generalize," she says. "They have to do this multistep process that involves going to look for a token, picking it up, bringing it back, putting it in the right place, and then looking up at me standing in the tower and waiting for that reward to come."

Results from both these studies have supported the claim that wild chimpanzees share and maintain behavioral patterns that approximate human culture. "What we have established here is that you can get reliable transmission of behavior in chimpanzees," says de Waal. "That supports the claims of the field workers, who say that the variation we see is probably due to social learning." Insights garnered from field work must be complemented and substantiated by controlled experiments in a captive setting, de Waal says. "Each study has its limitations, but if you put them all together, you get a pretty strong picture."

It's now Socrates' turn to perform. The alpha-male of Yerkes' other captive chimp community sits at his enclosure's fence, reaching through the chain link to grab the top of a dusty-blue plastic garbage can and bang it against the ground. A white garbage can with a plastic tube protruding from its top sits next to the blue one, but Socrates pays it no mind. He continues to bang the blue garbage can with flicks of his hairy wrist and seems to be urging Bonnie to get the demonstration started.

Bonnie, with two buckets in hand, ascends the wooden observation tower that rises above Socrates' enclosure. One bucket contains halved bananas and the other contains tokens, which are actually short segments of PVC pipe, painted bright orange. Bonnie flings tokens into the chimps' enclosure, one by one, scattering the orange tubes among the wooden climbing structure, concrete culverts, and truck tires on which the chimps normally cavort.

Socko (as Bonnie calls him) ambles over and picks up two tokens, stashes one in his mouth, and hurries back to his position in front of the blue garbage can. Taking a seat, he drops one of the tokens into a hole in the garbage can, and it rattles to the bottom with a thump. Socko tilts his head up towards the tower, fixing his gaze on Bonnie and the bucket in her hand. Bonnie lobs him a banana, Socko eats it, and then pops his second token into the garbage can. Again a banana sails down to him from the tower. As Socko relishes his second tossed banana, more chimps venture out from their indoor enclosure or rouse from shaded naps to brave the mounting Georgia humidity and collect their own tokens.

They appear to share and maintain clever behaviors within their communities, but are the Yerkes chimps really uncovering some of the fundamental aspects of culture? Moreover, are these attributes of chimpanzee behavior related to human culture? After all, they're using socially shared foraging techniques that differ only slightly from techniques employed by another conspecific group.

"If you eat with chopsticks and I eat with knife and fork, we call that a cultural difference, because we know it's not in your genes to eat with chopsticks," says de Waal, director of the Living Links Center. "So we call that cultural variation in humans, and for the same reason, we use that term [for chimpanzees]."

Though no suite of ape behaviors can match the rich tapestry of human cultural traditions, chimps like Steward and Socko may be revealing a primitive form of cultural behavior that originated somewhere in our shared evolutionary history.

"I think we all assume, in primatology at least, that our ancestors started out with the kind of culture that chimpanzees have," de Waal says. "We started adding on to it and expanding it, so it is all a continuum."

References
1. J. Goodall, "Tool-using and aimed throwing in a community of free-living chimpanzees," Nature, 201:1264-6, 1964. [PUBMED]
2. W.C. McGrew et al., "Evidence for a social custom in wild chimpanzees?" Man, 13:234-51, 1978.
3. A. Whiten et al., "Culture in chimpanzees," Nature, 399:682-5, 1999. [PUBMED]
4. A. Whiten et al., "Conformity of cultural norms of tool use in chimpanzees," Nature, 437:737-40, 2005. [PUBMED]
5. K.E. Bonnie et al., "Spread of arbitrary conventions among chimpanzees: a controlled study," Proc Royal Soc, 274:367-72, 2007. [PUBMED]

http://www.the-scientist.com/article/daily/53392/

 

[ramonmercado]

Planet of the Apes is here! The little f*&^ers are starting to outsmart us.

Chimps beat humans in memory test
By Helen Briggs
Science reporter, BBC News



Chimpanzees have an extraordinary photographic memory that is far superior to ours, research suggests.

Young chimps outperformed university students in memory tests devised by Japanese scientists.

The tasks involved remembering the location of numbers on a screen, and correctly recalling the sequence.

The findings, published in Current Biology, suggest we may have under-estimated the intelligence of our closest living relatives.

Until now, it had always been assumed that chimps could not match humans in memory and other mental skills.

"There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said lead researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.

We are still underestimating the intellectual capability of chimpanzees, our evolutionary neighbours

Dr Tetsuro Matsuzawa

"No one can imagine that chimpanzees - young chimpanzees at the age of five - have a better performance in a memory task than humans.

"Here we show for the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection - better than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus, following the same procedure."

Memory tests

Dr Matsuzawa and colleagues tested three pairs of mother and baby chimpanzees against university students in a memory task involving numbers.




Human v Chimp

The mothers and their five-year-old offspring had already been taught to "count" from one to nine.

During the experiment, each subject was presented with various numerals from one to nine on a touch screen monitor.

The numbers were then replaced with blank squares and the test subject had to remember which number appeared in which location, then touch the appropriate square.

They found that, in general, the young chimps performed better than their mothers and the adult humans.

The university students were slower than all of the three young chimpanzees in their response.

The researchers then varied the amount of time that the numbers appeared on-screen to compare the working memory of humans and chimps.

Chimps performed much better than university students in speed and accuracy when the numbers appeared only briefly on screen.

The shortest time duration, 210 milliseconds, did not leave enough time for the subjects to explore the screen by eye movement - something we do all the time when we read.

This is evidence, the researchers believe, that young chimps have a photographic memory which allows them to memorise a complex scene or pattern at a glance. This is sometimes present in human children but declines with age, they say.

"Young chimpanzees have a better memory than human adults," Dr Matsuzawa told BBC News.

"We are still underestimating the intellectual capability of chimpanzees, our evolutionary neighbours."

'Ground-breaking'

Dr Lisa Parr, who works with chimps at the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University in Atlanta, US, described the research as "ground-breaking".


Dr Matsuzawa and chimps Ai and Ayuma

She said the importance of these primates for understanding the skills necessary for the evolution of modern humans was unparalleled.

"They are our closest living relatives and thus are in a unique position to inform us about our evolutionary heritage," said Dr Parr.

"These studies tell us that elaborate short-term memory skills may have had a much more salient function in early humans than is present in modern humans, perhaps due to our increasing reliance on language-based memory skills."

The research is published in Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7124156.stm

 

[rynner2]

Now they're writing books..!

Cheeta's book makes monkeys out of stars
By Adam Lusher
Last Updated: 11:19pm BST 26/04/2008

He was Tarzan's sidekick on the ape man's most dangerous adventures. Now Cheeta the chimp is taking on the literary jungle.

The veteran of 50 films has "written" his life story, Me Cheeta. While the name of the ghostwriter is a closely guarded secret, the tongue-in-cheek biography includes biting attacks on some of Cheeta's co-stars.

Hollywood insiders say the chimp, now 76, had to be chained to stop him attacking Maureen O'Sullivan, who played Jane, during her love scenes with Tarzan, played by Johnny Weissmuller. Cheeta admits giving O'Sullivan a "good nip to the flank". "She couldn't even act an affection for animals, although, to give the harmless old trout her due, it was probably just me she disliked." The chimp also bit Lupe Velez, Weissmuller's second wife. "She tasted quite different from Maureen O'Sullivan."

Cheeta, recognised by Guinness World Records as the longest-lived chimpanzee, arrived in New York on April 9 1932 and made his film debut in 1934 in Tarzan and His Mate, the first of his 12 Tarzan films. Cheeta is now retired, living in Palm Springs, California.

Fourth Estate, the publisher, has appointed Nicholas Pearson, Doris Lessing's literary editor, to oversee the primate's prose. He was reluctant to discuss how Cheeta's fee compared with the £5 million reputedly paid to the footballer Wayne Rooney, 22, for his "life story". The editor would only say: "It's not peanuts, or bananas."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... eta127.xml

 

[rynner2]

Ape Genius reveals depth of animal intelligence
By Paul Eccleston
Last Updated: 5:01pm BST 02/05/2008

Chimpanzees in Senegal make and sharpen spears with their teeth to go hunting. Like our own ancestors they have learned to use tools to kill their quarry more effectively.

They use their colossal strength to thrust their spears into holes in trees where they suspect nocturnal bushbabies are sleeping.

Anthropologist Jill Pruetz believes she has made a landmark discovery - a species other than humans learning - and passing on - the skills to make a lethal weapon.

The generation of ideas and sharing a skill is a scientific definition of culture.

In another part of Africa a young chimp lowers himself gingerly into a cooling pool and squealing with excitement - in exactly the same way as a human child would. Apes are supposed to be afraid of water but this one is actively using the water as a tool to enjoy a dip.

In controlled laboratory experiments another chimpanzee called Judy quickly learns how to use a complex series of manoeuvres, turning wheels and pulling handles in order, to obtain a piece of fruit from a specially constructed wooden slot machine. But even more remarkably other chimps watch her success and then learn the skill themselves.

Learning by imitation is regarded as an essential skill for culture.

Apes display rudimentary traditions which could be interpreted as culture but are they really bright enough to develop a proper culture?

The apes are all stars of a new film - Ape Genius - which gives a fascinating insight into the depth of intelligence of animals who share 99 per cent of human genes. In it they reveal the skills, reasoning powers and emotions that were once thought to be uniquely human.

The stars include Koko a gorilla who understands sign language, Azy an orangutan maths champion, and Kanzi a bonobo who understands more than 3,000 words of English.

The film demonstrates that apes are more like us than we ever imagined and only the lack of a few mental skills has prevented them making the giant evolutionary development steps taken by their human cousins.

What's the little difference that makes the big difference and how big is the gap between Them and Us?, the film asks.

In west Africa Japanese researchers watch a mother care for sick two-years-old infant. She puts her paw on his forehead in exactly the way as a parent would check for a temperature in a child. As the baby chimp's life ebbs away she cares for him devotedly and when he dies she carries him around on her back for weeks almost refusing to accept that he is gone.

It is impossible to know what she is thinking but not difficult to recognise that she is stricken with grief.

"When I see the scene of the mother looking at the baby, I really recognise the emotional life of chimpanzees are so similar to us," says one of the researchers.

But if apes have the power to reason, learn skills, feel emotion and co-operate in a frenzied tree-top hunt for Colobus monkeys as chimpanzees do, why don't we have a planet of the apes?

The film reveals that although apes will co-operate to obtain food they don't have a shared commitment, they don't have the passion to urge or cheer on a tribe member and they do not have control of their emotions. They are also violent, impulsive and display deadly rivalry.

Although they can be taught to recognise symbols and words they don't have the mental capacity to contribute to a 'conversation' - and they don't make small talk. And most important of all although they can imitate, they can't teach or build on the achievements others have made - unlike more successful humans.

Their mental rocket is on the launch pad but it hasn't taken off, the film concludes.

Ape Genius will be shown on the National Geographic Wild Channel on Thursday May 8 at 9.00pm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.j ... imp102.xml

 

[ramonmercado]

Bonobos May Have Greater Linguistic Skills Than Previously T

More on Bonobos. Full text at link.

Bonobos May Have Greater Linguistic Skills Than Previously Thought

ScienceDaily (Sep. 2, 2008) — What happens when linguistic tools used to analyze human language are applied to a conversation between a language-competent bonobo and a human? The findings, published this month in the Journal of Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, indicate that bonobos may exhibit larger linguistic competency in ordinary conversation than in controlled experimental settings.

The peer-reviewed paper was written by Janni Pedersen, an Iowa State University Ph.D. candidate from Denmark whose interests in the language-competent bonobos at Great Ape Trust of Iowa led her to the United States, and William M. Fields, director of bonobo research at Great Ape Trust.

Their findings run counter to the view among some linguists, including the influential Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who argue that only humans possess and use language. In his hierarchy of language, Chomsky believes that language is part of the genetic makeup of humans and did not descend from a single primitive language evolved from the lower primate order, and it must include formal structures such as grammar and syntax.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 171701.htm

 

[ramonmercado]

Hippie apes make war as well as love, study finds
http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre49c ... -hunting/#
By Michael Kahn

LONDON, Oct. 13, 2008 (Reuters) — Despite their reputation as lovers not fighters of the primate world, bonobos actually hunt and eat other great apes, German researchers said Monday.

Their findings, the first direct evidence of hunting by the so-called "hippie" apes, show that such behavior is not linked to male dominance as females rule bonobo society and also go on hunts.

"We always have this view that hunting is a male business," said Gottfried Hohmann of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "What our study shows is this is not necessarily the case.

"This has implications for models on early humans that people have proposed how humans have evolved," said Hohmann, whose findings are published in Current Biology.

Bonobos, chimpanzees and orangutans, collectively known as the great apes, are the closest genetic relatives to humans and scientists study their behavior to learn more about our own evolution.

The apes are generally considered more peaceful than their close cousins, the chimps, and have a reputation for free-loving ways because sex plays a major role their society, being used for greetings, conflict resolution and reconciliation.

Scientists had thought bonobos, found in the lowland forest south of the river Congo, only ate small animals such as squirrels, forest antelopes and rodents they encountered.

But over five years of observing a group of bonobos the researchers recorded about 10 instances when a group of the apes set out on hunting trips in search of chimpanzees.

Each time the bonobos silently crept through the woods on the ground, trying to get underneath a group of chimps before clambering up a tree in a sudden attack, the researchers said.

The bonobo hunts were successful on fewer than half the excursions and in some cases shared the meat, evidence they were willing to share to encourage group hunting, Hohmann and colleagues said.

(Editing by Will Dunham and Opheera McDoom)

 

[ramonmercado]

We're doomed I tell ye. Soon we'll have a chimp as Business Secretary...

Orphan Chimpanzees Cleverer Than Humans, Study Finds
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 140437.htm

An infant orphan chimpanzee with Professor Bard (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Portsmouth)ScienceDaily (Feb. 2, 2009) — Orphaned chimpanzee infants given special ‘mothering’ by humans are more advanced than the average child at nine months of age.

In the first study to examine the effect of different types of care for infant chimpanzees on cognition, researchers found chimpanzees who were given extra emotionally-based care were more cognitively advanced than human infants.

Humans overtake chimpanzees in development terms as they grow older but the study sends stark warnings that looking after just an infant’s physical needs is likely to result in a child who is maladjusted, unhappy and under-achieving.

The study was carried out by psychology expert Professor Kim Bard, of the Centre for the Study of Emotion at the University of Portsmouth.

She said: “The attachment system of infant chimpanzees appears surprisingly similar to that found in human infants. Early experiences, either of warm, responsive care-giving or of extreme deprivation, have a dramatic impact on emotional and cognitive outcomes in both chimpanzees and humans.

“Parental sensitivity is an important factor in human infant development, contributing to emotionally and cognitively strong children, and it would seem the same is true for great apes, as well.”

Professor Bard studied 46 chimpanzees in the Great Ape Nursery at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre in Atlanta, America, in the 1980s and 1990s. The chimpanzees were in the nursery because their mothers’ maternal skills were so inadequate the infants were at risk of dying.

She found that chimpanzees given 20 hours a week of responsive care, which looks after the emotional and physical development, were happier, more advanced and better adjusted than chimpanzees given standard institutionalised care which meets just their physical needs.

She said: “Those given responsive care were less easily stressed, less often attached to ‘comfort blankets’, had healthier relationships with their caregivers and were less likely to develop stereotypic rocking. They were also more advanced intellectually than chimpanzees reared with standard institutionalised care.”

The responsive care was given by human caregivers who would play, groom, feed and interact with the infants. The caregivers focused on nurturing emotional and communicative well-being, similar to that found in the parenting behaviour of well adjusted mother chimpanzees. This level of care lasted through the first year of life and the chimpanzees’ development was assessed at various stages using the same tests as those used to assess development and attachment in human infants.

The chimpanzees raised with standard institutionalised care were more likely to show signs of ‘disorganised attachment’, including rocking, or clasping themselves or a blanket, instead of seeking comfort from a carer when distressed. They also showed other contradictory behaviours such as being distressed in the absence of a carer but ‘freezing’ when the main carer returned after a brief absence.

In human infants, ‘disorganised attachments’ are seen in children whose parents have unresolved losses or other trauma, and/or when the infants are abused or neglected.

Dr Bard said: “Responsive care, which meets infants’ emotional as well as physical needs, stimulates cognitive and emotional development.

“Infant chimpanzees who were given this care were more advanced and less likely to develop attachment to things like security blankets than chimpanzees whose care was only meeting their physical needs.”

It is the first study to investigate individual differences in attachment relationships in great apes and is also the first intervention study with non-human primates evaluating the effects of two types of human care, differing in quality and quantity, on infant chimpanzees’ cognitive development and attachment security.

The study was co-authored by Professor Bard and Krisztina Ivan of the University of Portsmouth’s Centre for the Study of Emotion and Professor Marinus van IJzendoorn and Dr Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg of the Centre for Child and Family Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Partial funding was provided by the European Commission for the Feelix Growing project. The study is published in Developmental Psychobiology.

 

[ramonmercado]

Aaaargh! They are getting into politics!

Small Male Chimps Use Politics, Rather Than Aggression, To Lead The Pack
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 174958.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 3, 2009) — With most mammals, the biggest and most aggressive male claims the alpha male role and gets his choice of food and females. But a new study from the University of Minnesota suggests that at least among chimpanzees, smaller, more mild-mannered males can also use political behavior to secure the top position.


The finding was gleaned from 10 years of observing dominant male chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, looking at behaviors they used to compete for alpha male status relative to their size. Analysis showed that larger males relied more on physical attacks to dominate while smaller, gentler males groomed other chimpanzees, both male and female, to gain broad support.

The study focused on three alpha males who reigned between 1989 and 2003. Frodo, one of the largest and most aggressive male chimpanzees ever observed at Gombe, weighed 51.2 kg (112.6 lbs.) at his peak. He relied on his size and aggression to rule. While he allowed other chimpanzees to groom him, he seldom returned the favor. At the other end of the spectrum, Wilkie, who weighed only 37 kg (81.4 lbs.), obsessively groomed both male and female chimpanzees to maintain his top position. And Freud, who weighed 44.8 kg (98.6 lbs.), used a combination of the two strategies. (The average male chimp in Gombe weighs about 39 kg (85.8 lbs.).

The findings are reported in the February issue of the American Journal of Primatology. While it's widely known that grooming plays an important role in chimpanzee social interaction, this study is the first to show that it can be a strategy for achieving dominance.

Mark Foster, who was an undergraduate pursuing a bachelor of arts degree in anthropology and a B.F.A. in acting when the research was conducted, was the study's lead author of the study. As a recipient of a Katherine E. Sullivan Fellowship he later spent six months in Tanzania and Gombe and then became an educational assistant at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.

"Mark showed extraordinary creativity and tenacity in pulling together this study while still an undergraduate and then seeing it through to publication," said Anne Pusey, who was senior author. Pusey is director of the Jane Goodall Institute's Center for Primate Studies at the University of Minnesota and a University McKnight Distinguished Professor in the College of Biological Sciences' department of ecology, evolution and behavior (EEB).

Other collaborators included EEB graduate students Ian Gilby, who guided Foster in the initial outline of the question and in data extraction; Carson Murray, who guided data analysis; and Emily Wroblewski, who analyzed data on male dominance hierarchies. Statistics graduate student Alicia Johnson of the U of M Statistics Clinic guided the statistical analysis. Gilby is now a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, and Murray a post-doctoral fellow at Lincoln Park Zoo.

"We were aware that Frodo was a bully and a stingy groomer, but we did not know how closely grooming patterns would correlate with body size," Pusey said. "We plan to study more alpha males to determine if grooming is a common strategy that small-bodied males use to placate rivals or cultivate cooperative alliances."

The Jane Goodall Institute's Center for Primate Studies was established in 1995 at the College of Biological Sciences by Pusey, a former student of Goodall's. Pusey brought all of Goodall's field notes and photographs from 48 years in Gombe to the University of Minnesota. She is overseeing the creation of a searchable, online database providing access to Goodall's research material.

 

[ramonmercado]

Chimps craft ultimate fishing rod
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7922120.stm
By Rebecca Morelle
Science reporter, BBC News

The chimps use their teeth to form the brush-tipped termite-fishing tool (Footage: Biology Letters/C Sanz/J Call/ D Morgan)

Scientists believe they have solved the mystery of why some chimpanzees are so good at catching termites.

A team working in the Republic of Congo discovered that the chimps are crafting brush-tipped "fishing rods" to scoop the insects out of their nests.

They filmed the wild primates using their teeth to fashion the tools.

Writing in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, the researchers said the probes' frayed ends helped the chimpanzees to collect more termites.

Lead researcher Crickette Sanz, from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said: "They have invented a way to improve their termite-fishing technique."

Surveillance techniques

Previous studies have suggested that wild chimpanzees use brush-tipped tools to fish for termites.
The chimps seem to understand the function of the tool and its importance in gathering termites

Crickette Sanz

But until now it has been unclear whether this was a specially crafted design feature or whether the frayed edges were a by-product of repeated tool use.

Using remote cameras to film the chimps as they sought out their insect snacks, the team was able to find an answer.

Dr Sanz told the BBC: "We found that in the Goualougo Triangle in the Republic of Congo, the chimpanzees were modifying their termite-fishing tools with a special brush tip."

To make their rods, the chimps first picked some stems from the Marantaceae plant and plucked off the leaves.

"They then pulled the herb stems through their teeth, which were partially closed, to make the brush and they also attended to the brush by sometimes pulling apart the fibres to make them better at gathering the termites," Dr Sanz added.

Learned skill

Further research revealed that a stem with a frayed tip collected 10 times more termites than a pointed probe.
The chimps create the rods from plant stems

Dr Sanz said: "The chimps seem to understand the function of the tool and its importance in gathering termites."

So far, the team have only found this behaviour in chimps in the Goualougo Triangle.

The apparent absence of this in populations in eastern and western Africa suggests that it is not an innate skill found in all chimpanzees.

Instead it seems that the Goualougo primates are learning the crafting techniques from other chimps.

The researchers say they now want to find out if chimps in this region are creating any other kinds of tools.

Dr Sanz said: "Large areas of central Africa have been largely unstudied and so there are many populations that could have examples of complex tool use that we just do not know about."

However, she added that further research might be hampered as the species was under threat.

"Just as we are learning about these exciting new complex tool behaviours, the chimps that are showing us these behaviours are under danger from logging, poaching and Ebola," she explained.

"There is a lot we need to do to conserve the chimps in the Congo Basin."

Dr Sanz worked on the paper with Josep Call, also from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, and David Morgan from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo.

 

[rynner2]

Zoo chimp 'planned' stone attacks

A male chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo planned hundreds of stone-throwing attacks on zoo visitors, according to researchers.

Keepers at Furuvik Zoo found that the chimp collected and stored stones that he would later use as missiles.

Further, the chimp learned to recognise how and when parts of his concrete enclosure could be pulled apart to fashion further projectiles.

The findings are reported in the journal Current Biology.

There has been scant evidence in previous research that animals can plan for future events.

Crucial to the current study is the fact that Santino, a chimpanzee at the zoo in the city north of Stockholm, collected the stones in a calm state, prior to the zoo opening in the morning.

The launching of the stones occurred hours later - during dominance displays to zoo visitors - with Santino in an "agitated" state.

This suggests that Santino was anticipating a future mental state - an ability that has been difficult to definitively prove in animals, according to Mathias Osvath, a cognitive scientist from Lund University in Sweden and author of the new research.

"We've done experimental studies, and the chimps in my mind show very clearly that they do plan for future needs, but it has been argued that perhaps this was an experimental artefact," Dr Osvath told BBC News.

"Now we have this spontaneous behaviour, which is always in some sense better evidence."

Dr Osvath embarked on the study after zoo staff discovered caches of stones in the section of the enclosure facing the public viewing area.

Since the initial discovery in 1997, hundreds of the caches have been removed to protect visitors, to whom the caching and the aggressive displays seem strictly related; in the off season, Santino neither hoards the projectiles nor hurls them.

Most interestingly, Santino seems to have learned how to spot weak parts of the concrete "boulders" in the centre of the enclosure.

When water seeps into cracks in the concrete and freezes, portions become detached that make a hollow sound when tapped.

Santino was observed gently knocking on the "boulders", hitting harder to detach bits that were loosened and adding those to his stashes of ammunition.

There are a number of examples of complex behaviour in apes that suggest forms of consciousness.

Planning behaviour like that of the current work is connected to so-called autonoetic consciousness, where information due to memory can be distinguished from that from the senses.

"I'm personally convinced that at least chimps do plan for future needs, that they do have this autonoetic consciousness," Dr Osvath said.

"I hope that other zoos or those in the wild will look more closely at what is happening," he added.

"I bet there must be a lot of these kinds of behaviours out there, and I wouldn't be surprised if we find them in dolphins or other species."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7928996.stm

 

[Timble2]

That's hardly news. An animal technician I used to work with had previously worked in a zoo and told me about one chimp in particular that realised what chaos it could cause by throwing pooh at the spectators. It used to stockpile its droppings until it judged that there was a sufficiently large group of people outside its enclosure for maximum amusement value (for the chimp that is),,,,

 

[rynner2]

'Armed' chimps go wild for honey
By Rebecca Morelle
Science reporter, BBC News

Cameras have revealed how "armed" chimpanzees raid beehives to gorge on sweet honey.

Scientists in the Republic of Congo found that the wild primates crafted large clubs from branches to pound the nests until they broke open.

The team said some chimps would also use a "toolkit" of different wooden implements in a bid to access the honey and satisfy their sweet tooth.

The study is published in the International Journal of Primatology.

The primatologists also found that the Congo chimps' tool use was more sophisticated than previously thought.

David Morgan, a co-author on the study from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, said: "One of the most exciting aspects is that they are using multiple tools to access the honey that is in these hives.

"They have a tool kit ready when they go for honey.
"They will have large pounding clubs and they'll use those to hammer the hives.

"And if that doesn't do, if the holes are too small, then they'll access them using smaller, thinner dipping wands. And they are also using smaller sticks for leverage to get better access to the hive."

The researchers also said that once the chimps had spotted and then crafted a suitable club from a branch, by pulling off unwanted twigs and leaves with their teeth or hands, they would set it aside for later use.

Dr Morgan said: "They cache them in the canopy."

Last week, the same team also reported how Goualougo Triangle chimps were crafting fishing rods with a brush-tipped end to fish for termites, and the scientists say there is still much to learn about tool use in these chimps.

However, they told the BBC that the chimps' future was uncertain, as the primates and their habitat were under threat.

Dr Morgan said: "These beehives are found in tree species that are exploited for logging, so this could be a direct affect we have on their behaviour, their feeding and their conservation."

Crickette Sanz, from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said: "The nutritional returns don't seem to be that great.

"But their excitement when they've succeeded is incredible, you can see how much they are enjoying tasting the honey."

Chimps' love of honey and their ingenuity at accessing it are well known amongst primatologists - previous studies have revealed how the great apes can fashion sticks to dip into or prise open nests.

But until now, nobody realised how prevalent the beehive-bashing behaviour was amongst chimpanzees in the Goualougo Triangle in the Congo Basin.

Dr Sanz said: "It seems these chimps in central Africa have developed more sophisticated techniques for getting at the honey than populations in northern and western Africa - maybe it is some kind of regional feature."

Perhaps for obvious reasons, the chimps avoided bee species that sting, targeting the hives of stingless bees instead. 8)

Dr Sanz told the BBC: "But these nests are tough to get into - they can be at the top of the forest canopy, at the end of a branch - and the chimps will go up there and hang at all sorts of precarious angles to get to the honey, using these clubs in any way that they can to access it."

The video footage, which was filmed by the researchers over four years, revealed the chimps' sheer determination to get at the sweet stuff.

Dr Sanz explained: "Nobody knew they would pound over 1,000 times to get to the honey.

"Sometimes it could take several hours - they would start in the morning at around 1000, then take some rests, and then finish up at about 1400 or 1500 in the afternoon.

"It is quite physically challenging - in the videos you can see how large those pounding clubs are - some weigh over a kilogram."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7946614.stm

 

[ramonmercado]

Chimps born to appreciate music
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_ne ... 174534.stm
Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News


Cannot play media.You do not have the correct version of the flash player. Download the correct version
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A young chimp called Sakura replays pleasant tunes that she likes more often than those she doesn't

Chimpanzees are biologically programmed to appreciate pleasant music.

The discovery comes from experiments showing that an infant chimpanzee prefers to listen to consonant music over dissonant music.

That suggests the apes are born with an innate appreciation of pleasant sounds, say scientists in the journal Primates.

Until now, this was thought to be a universal human trait, but the new finding suggests it evolved in the ancestors of humans and modern apes.

Tasuku Sugimoto and Kazuhide Hashiya of Kyushu University in Hakozaki and colleagues in Japan tested how a young captive chimpanzee named Sakura responded to music as she aged from 17 weeks to 23 weeks old.

Sakura had been been abandoned by her mother, forcing members of the staff at Itozu-no-mori Park in Fukuoka where she lived to care for her.

One of the major factors that constitute musical appreciation might not be unique to humans

Japanese researchers outline their discovery in the journal Primates
Crucially, she had never been exposed to any form of music before she took part in the trials.

During the experiments, Sakura lay on a bed while a woollen string was attached to her right hand, allowing the infant chimp to pull on the cord at will.

A music player and speakers was then set up around her, playing melodies lasting between 38 and 63 seconds long. Every time Sakura pulled on the cord, the music would be repeated.

During six trials, conducted one a week for six weeks with each lasting around 20 minutes, the researchers played Sakura a range of tunes.

One was a 38 second minuet from Duette Englischer Meister in F major. Another, a 38 second minuet from a handwritten sheet of German music composed in 1720.

These consonant tunes were also adjusted using orchestration software to make them dissonant. For example, all the Gs in the 38 second Duette Englischer Meister music were altered to G-flat and all the Cs to C-flat, creating 32 dissonant intervals.

In three of the six trials, the researchers first played Sakura the more pleasant consonant music and in the others, they started with the less pleasant sounding dissonant music.

Play it again

Across all six sessions, Sakura pulled on the cord to voluntarily listen to the pleasurable music significantly more often than to the dissonant passages.

"Our main surprise was the results being so consistent," says Hashiya. "She rapidly learnt the rule of the setup and consistently produced consonant music over dissonant music for longer duration."

The discovery that an infant chimp, with no prior exposure to music, innately prefers to listen to consonant melodies could have important implications for how an appreciation for music evolved.

"Music is one of the universal human natures beyond cultures, just like language," says Hashiya.

But it was always thought that it was a uniquely human trait, one present even in babies just a few days old.

"The preference for consonant music over dissonant music in an infant chimpanzee has implications for the debate surrounding human uniqueness in the capacity for music appreciation," the researchers write in Primates.


Bored by what they're hearing?
Experiments have shown that various bird species can differentiate between consonant and dissonant sounds, but they do not actively prefer listening to one over the other.

Other research on cotton-top tamarin monkeys also found no such preference.

But Sakura's appreciation for consonant melodies "specifically suggests that one of the major factors that constitute musical appreciation might not be unique to humans: instead it might be something that we share with our phylogenetically closest relatives," say the researchers.

Hashiya explains that it is very difficult to rule out whether young human infants have had prior exposure to music on the radio or in their family's house before they are tested.

"To figure out the response of Sakura, we have to consider her lack of music experience, which should draw a clear contrast with ordinary human infants. It supports the view that the preference is independent of cultural experience," he says.

The researchers hope to study the effect further.

For now they speculate that the chimps' innate preference for pleasurable melodies may serve some biological function in the wild, perhaps helping them detect other chimps' voices above other sounds, for example.

 

[ramonmercado]

New Evidence Of Culture In Wild Chimpanzees
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/New_E ... s_999.html

Perhaps the strongest evidence for animal culture has come from studies on wild chimpanzees in Africa, Zuberbuhler said. For instance, 15 years of field observation has shown that Kibale chimps habitually use sticks as tools, whereas Budongo chimps never do. Both groups make use of leaf sponges to access water from tree holes.

by Staff Writers

Fife, UK (SPX) Oct 28, 2009
A new study of chimpanzees living in the wild adds to evidence that our closest primate relatives have cultural differences, too. The study, reported online in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, shows that neighboring chimpanzee populations in Uganda use different tools to solve a novel problem: extracting honey trapped within a fallen log.
Kibale Forest chimpanzees use sticks to get at the honey, whereas Budongo Forest chimpanzees rely on leaf sponges-absorbent wedges that they make out of chewed leaves.

"The most reasonable explanation for this difference in tool use was that chimpanzees resorted to preexisting cultural knowledge in trying to solve the novel task," said Klaus Zuberbuhler of the University of St Andrews in Scotland. "Culture, in other words, helped them in dealing with a novel problem."

"Culture" in this sense refers to a population-specific set of behaviors acquired through social learning, such as imitation, Zuberbuhler explained. That's in contrast to an animal or human learning something on his or her own through trial and error, without taking into account what others around them do, or behaviors that are "hard-wired" and require no learning at all.

Behavioral differences among animal populations have been taken as evidence of culture, the researchers said, but it's a notion that has remained controversial. Some think that other explanations-differences in the environment or in genetics-seem more likely.

Perhaps the strongest evidence for animal culture has come from studies on wild chimpanzees in Africa, Zuberbuhler said. For instance, 15 years of field observation has shown that Kibale chimps habitually use sticks as tools, whereas Budongo chimps never do. Both groups make use of leaf sponges to access water from tree holes.

The question is, are those differences really cultural? That's been a hard question to answer because scientists couldn't rule out all of the possible ecological or genetic explanations for those behavioral differences. Scientists have seen social transmission of behaviors among chimpanzees living in captivity, with good evidence that the chimps can socially learn arbitrary behavior. It still wasn't clear whether those findings were relevant to chimps in the wild.

To help get around earlier limitations in the new study, Zuberbuhler and his colleague Thibaud Gruber presented the two well-known chimpanzee groups with something that they hadn't seen before, in this case, honey trapped inside a narrow hole drilled into a log.

"With our experiment we were able to rule out that the observed differences in chimpanzee tool use behavior are the result of genetic differences because we tested members of the same subspecies," Zuberbuhler said. They also ruled out habitat influences by exposing the chimps to the same unfamiliar problem.

Zuberbuhler said that they were surprised by how quickly the animals found their respective solutions. "The cultural differences, in other words, must be deeply entrenched in their minds," he said.

 

[rynner2]

Chimp's dance suggests a mental grasp of fire
10:50 06 January 2010 by Fergal MacErlean

Chimps have been reported dancing in rainstorms – and now it seems our closest relation has a "fire dance", too. A dominant male chimp performed such a dance in the face of a raging savannah fire in Senegal.

Anthropologist Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University in Ames recounts that the male faced the fire with "a really exaggerated slow-motion display" before redirecting his display at chimps sheltering in a nearby baobab tree. Barking vocalisations from the male, never heard in more than 2000 hours of monitoring the group, were also heard.

Pruetz and co-author Thomas LaDuke at the East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania suggest that the chimps were cognisant enough to predict the fire's movement, retreating short distances at a time while staying calm. Other animals, in contrast, panic when fire approaches.

"If chimps with their small brain size can conceptually deal with fire, then maybe we should rethink some of the earliest evidence for fire usage," Pruetz says. The earliest confirmed evidence of controlled fire use dates to several thousand years ago but some palaeoanthropologists argue control began as far back as 1 to 2 million years ago. The chimps' responses to two fires – set for land clearance – were seen in 2006.

Primatologist William McGrew at the University of Cambridge is wary of granting chimps a "conceptualisation of fire", but further work could yield interesting results, he says.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... ef=dn18342

 

[ramonmercado]

Movie made by chimpanzees to be broadcast on television
By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News


chimp's view of the world
The world's first film shot entirely by chimpanzees is to be broadcast by the BBC as part of a natural history documentary.

The apes created the movie using a specially designed chimp-proof camera given to them by primatologists.

The film-making exercise is part of a scientific study into how chimpanzees perceive the world and each other.

It will be screened within the Natural World programme "Chimpcam" shown on BBC Two at 2000GMT on Wednesday 27 January.

Making the movie was the brainchild of primatologist Ms Betsy Herrelko, who is studying for a PhD in primate behaviour at the University of Stirling, UK.


Point and shoot with Chimpcam
Over 18 months, she introduced video technology to a group of 11 chimpanzees living in a newly built enclosure at Edinburgh Zoo, UK.

The enclosure, which contains three large interlinked outdoor arenas, as well as a series of smaller rooms in which the apes can be studied by researchers, is the largest of its kind in the world.

Despite the fact that the chimps had never taken part in a research project before, they soon displayed an interest in film-making.

Ms Herrelko set the chimps two challenges.

The first was to teach the chimps how to use a touchscreen to select different videos.

By doing so, Ms Herrelko could investigate which types of images chimps prefer to watch.

The second challenge was to give the apes a "Chimpcam", a recording camera housed in a chimp-proof box.

CHIMP TECHNOLOGY



Chimps both in captivity and the wild will spontaneously use tools
Some use wooden hammers to break open nuts, others use rocks, while many use varying styles of stick to fish for termites and honey
Watch videos of chimps using tools here
On top of the box was a video screen that showed live images of whatever the camera was pointing at.

Initially, the chimps were more interested in each other than the video technology, as two male chimps within the study group vied to become the alpha male, disrupting the experiment.

But over time, some of the chimps learned how to select different videos to watch.

For example, the chimps could use a touchscreen to decide whether to watch footage of their outside enclosure, or the food preparation room, where zoo staff prepare the chimps' meals.

The results still have to be analysed in detail, but it seems the chimps did not prefer to watch any of these images over the others.

Ms Herrelko is not sure why, but it could be that the images shown were too familiar to the chimps or because they have no way of asking to see something different.

Then in the final the final stage of her work, she investigated what happened when she gave the Chimpcam to the whole group.


Watching wild relatives
Gradually, the chimps started playing with the Chimpcam, carrying it around the enclosure.

The chimps soon became interested in the camera view screen on the Chimpcam box, watching what happened as they moved the Chimpcam around filming new images.

Overall, they were more interested in the Chipcam viewfinder than they were the touchscreen in the research room.

The apes are unlikely to have actively tried to film any particular subject, or understand that by carrying Chimpcam around, they were making a film.

However, the result, as well as providing new information on how chimps like to see the world, may yet go down in television history.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_ne ... 472831.stm

 

[ramonmercado]

Buddy, can you spare a banana? Study finds that bonobos share like humans
http://www.physorg.com/news185198609.html
February 12th, 2010 in Biology / Plants & Animals


Bonobo. Photo taken by Kabir Bakie at the Cincinnati Zoo.

New research suggests that the act of voluntarily sharing something with another may not be entirely exclusive to the human experience. A study published in the March 9th issue of Current Biology observed that bonobos - a sister species of chimpanzees and, like chimps, our closest living relatives - consistently chose to actively share their food with others.

"It has been suggested that only humans voluntarily share their food," says lead study author Brian Hare from Duke University in North Carolina. "However, the food sharing preferences of the unusually tolerant bonobos have never been studied experimentally." Dr. Hare and Suzy Kwetuenda from the Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary for orphaned bonobos in the Democratic Republic of the Congo conducted a study with unrelated pairs of hungry bonobos.

In the study, bonobos had to choose whether to eat some food by themselves or to give another bonobo access to it. The test subjects had the opportunity to immediately eat the food or to use a "key" to open a door to an adjacent empty room or a room that had another bonobo in it. The test subjects could easily see into the adjacent rooms, so they know which one was empty and which was occupied.

"We found that the test subjects preferred to voluntarily open the recipient's door to allow them to share highly desirable food that they could have easily eaten alone—with no signs of aggression, frustration, or change in the speed or rate of sharing across trials," explains Dr. Hare. "This stable sharing pattern was particularly striking since in other, nonsharing contexts, bonobos are averse to food loss and adjust to minimize such losses."

The authors point out that it is possible that the bonobos in their study chose to share in order to obtain favors in the future. Additional studies are needed to gain further insight into why bonobos and humans share. "Given the continued debate about how to characterize the motivation underlying costly sharing in humans, it will certainly require future research to probe more precisely what psychological mechanisms motivate and maintain the preference we observe here in bonobos for voluntary, costly sharing," concludes Dr. Hare.

 

[ramonmercado]

More on sharing with vid.

Bonobos opt to share their food
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8548478.stm

Advertisement

The bonobo opts to share his treats (Footage: David Hare/Suzy Kwetuenda)

One of our closest primate relatives, the bonobo, has been shown to voluntarily share food, scientists report.

This sort of generous behaviour was previously thought by some to be an exclusively human trait.

But a team has carried out an experiment that revealed that bonobos were more likely to choose to share their food than opt to dine alone.

The research is published in the journal Current Biology.

Dr Brian Hare from Duke University, US, and Suzy Kwetuenda from Lola y Bonobo, a centre for orphaned bonobos in the Democratic Republic of Congo, gave a hungry bonobo access to a room with some food in it.

This room was adjacent to another two rooms, which the creature could easily see into. One of these rooms was empty while the other contained another bonobo.
Bonobos
Scientists want to find out what drives this behaviour

The hungry primate could then choose to eat the food alone or unlock the door by removing a wooden peg and share his fare with the other bonobo.

Dr Hare wrote in Current Biology: "We found that the test subjects preferred to voluntarily open the recipient's door to allow them to share the highly desirable food that they could have easily eaten alone."

They now hope to uncover why the bonobos seem to prefer to share their food.

Dr Hare said it could be purely altruistic, or more selfish motives could drive this behaviour because sharing could be exchanged for future favours.

The researchers hope this work could also shed light on what drives humans to voluntarily share.

 

[ramonmercado]

Chimpanzees use sex tools
http://www.physorg.com/news192258277.html
May 5th, 2010 in Biology / Plants & Animals
chimpanzee


Common chimpanzee in the Leipzig Zoo. Image credit: Thomas Lersch, via Wikipedia.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Many animals are known to use tools, but chimpanzees (our closest living relatives) show the most varied and complex use of tools, and the males in one group of chimps have even been observed using sex tools to attract a mate.

The definition of "tool" varies, but most scientists recognize objects as tools if they are inanimate objects outside the body of the user, if they are used to alter the environment in some way or to gain information about it, and if they are modified in some way in function, form or position. Chimpanzees were first observed using tools by Jane Goodall in 1960, when she documented chimps using blades of grass to extract termites, and chimps are now known to use a "tool kit" of around 20 tools, with the tools in the kit varying from one colony to another.

Researchers working in Tanzania have observed male chimpanzees plucking and breaking the dry, brittle leaves in front of their visible erection, and using the rasping sound to attract the attention of a female. If she is interested, the behavior is followed by mating. The use of leaves in this way has not been seen in other chimp groups, but chimps everywhere have been seen to use tools and combinations of tools in complex sequences to attain their goals, which may involve food, social rituals, or in this case, sexual desires.

In an essay in Science, primatologist and university lecturer in biological anthropology, Dr. William C. McGrew from the University of Cambridge, described the latest findings on tool use in chimpanzees. He said the leaves used by the Tanzanian chimps fit the definition of a tool because the chimps are using an external object to obtain a specific goal, which is to interest the female chimp in mating.

Dr McGrew is the author of the book “The Cultured Chimpanzee: Reflections on Cultural Primatology” and hundreds of scientific publications on non-human primates.

More information: William C. McGrew, Chimpanzee Technology, Science 30 April 2010: Vol. 328. no. 5978, pp. 579 - 580. DOI:10.1126/science.1187921

 

[ramonmercado]

Why chimpanzees attack and kill each other
http://www.physorg.com/news196342222.html

Bands of chimpanzees violently kill individuals from neighboring groups in order to expand their own territory, according to a 10-year study of a chimp community in Uganda that provides the first definitive evidence for this long-suspected function of this behavior.

University of Michigan primate behavioral ecologist John Mitani's findings are published in the June 22 issue of Current Biology.

During a decade of study, the researchers witnessed 18 fatal attacks and found signs of three others perpetrated by members of a large community of about 150 chimps at Ngogo, Kibale National Park.

Then in the summer of 2009, the Ngogo chimpanzees began to use the area where two-thirds of these events occurred, expanding their territory by 22 percent. They traveled, socialized and fed on their favorite fruits in the new region.

"When they started to move into this area, it didn't take much time to realize that they had killed a lot of other chimpanzees there," Mitani said. "Our observations help to resolve long-standing questions about the function of lethal intergroup aggression in chimpanzees."

Mitani is the James N. Spuhler Collegiate Professor in the Department of Anthropology. His co-authors are David Watts, an anthropology professor at Yale University, and Sylvia Amsler, a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Amsler worked on this project as a graduate student at U-M.

Chimpanzees (along with bonobos) are humans' closest living relatives. Anthropologists have long known that they kill their neighbors, and they suspected that they did so to seize their land.

"Although some previous observations appear to support that hypothesis, until now, we have lacked clear-cut evidence," Mitani said.

The bouts occurred when the primates were on routine, stealth "boundary patrols" into neighboring territory. Amsler, who conducted field work on this project described one of the attacks she witnessed far to the northwest of the Ngogo territory. She and a colleague were following 27 adult and adolescent males and one adult female.

"They had been on patrol outside of their territory for more than two hours when they surprised a small group of females from the community to the northwest," Amsler said. "Almost immediately upon making contact, the adult males in the patrol party began attacking the unknown females, two of whom were carrying dependent infants."

The Ngogo patrollers seized and killed one of the infants fairly quickly. They fought for 30 minutes to wrestle the other from its mother, but unsuccessfully. The Ngogo chimpanzees then rested for an hour, holding the female and her infant captive. Then they resumed their attack.

"Though they were never successful in grabbing the infant from its mother, the infant was obviously very badly injured, and we don't believe it could have survived," Amsler said.

In most of the attacks in this study, chimpanzee infants were killed. Mitani believes this might be because infants are easier targets than adult chimpanzees.

Scientists are still not sure if the chimpanzees' ultimate motive is resources or mates. They haven't ruled out the possibility that the attacks could attract new females to the Ngogo community.

Mitani says these findings disprove suggestions that the aggression is due to human intervention. Lethal attacks were first described by renowned primatologist Jane Goodall who, along with other human observers, used food to gain the chimps' trust. Some researchers posited that feeding the animals might have affected their behavior. The Michigan researchers didn't use food.

He cautions against drawing any connections to human warfare and suggests instead that the findings could speak to the origins of teamwork.

"Warfare in the human sense occurs for lots of different reasons," Mitani said. "I'm just not convinced we're talking about the same thing.

"What we've done at the end of our paper is to turn the issue on its head by suggesting our results might provide some insight into why we as a species are so unusually cooperative. The lethal intergroup aggression that we have witnessed is cooperative in nature, insofar as it involves coalitions of males attacking others. In the process, our chimpanzees have acquired more land and resources that are then redistributed to others in the group."

The paper is titled "Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees." The research is funded by the Detroit Zoological Institute, the Little Rock Zoo, the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, the University of Michigan, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and Yale University.

More information: Amsler et al.: “Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees.” Publishing in Current Biology 20, 12, June 22, 2010. http://www.current-biology.com

Provided by University of Michigan

 

[ramonmercado]

Vid at link.

Wild chimps outwit human hunters
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_ne ... 962747.stm
By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News

Advertisement

Quick learners: chimps approach and touch the snares, on these occasions without breaking them (video courtesy of Gaku Ohashi)

Wild chimpanzees are learning how to outwit human hunters.

Across Africa, people often lay snare traps to catch bushmeat, killing or injuring chimps and other wildlife.

But a few chimps living in the rainforests of Guinea have learnt to recognise these snare traps laid by human hunters, researchers have found.

More astonishing, the chimps actively seek out and intentionally deactivate the traps, setting them off without being harmed.

The discovery was serendipitously made by primatologists Mr Gaku Ohashi and Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa who were following chimps living in Bossou, Guinea to study the apes' social behaviour.

SNARES: A SPECIAL REPORT

Read a BBC special report into how bushmeat snares impact chimpanzees
Learn more about chimpanzees

Snare injuries to chimps are reported at many sites across east and west Africa where chimps are studied, with many animals dying in the traps.

However, very few snares injuries have been reported among chimps studied at Bossou, which is unusual as the chimps live close to human settlements and snares are commonly laid in the area.

Now primatologists know why.

While researching the chimps, Mr Ohashi and Prof Matsuzawa, of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University, Japan, observed five male chimps, both juvenile and adult, attempting to break and deactivate snares.

On two occasions witnessed, the chimps successfully deactivated the traps set for them.

Wire noose

A typical snare, for example one made by the Manon people of Bossou, consists of a loop of iron wire connected by a vine rope to an arched stick, often a sapling.
Common chimpanzee (Anup Shah / NaturePl.com)
On six separate occasions, chimps attempted to deactivate the traps

The sapling puts tension into the rope and once an animal passes through the wire loop, the trap is sprung and the sapling pulls it tight, around the neck or leg of an animal.

Such traps cause indiscriminate damage, ensnaring any and all animals that come into contact with them.

But male Bossou chimps have worked out how to outwit the hunters and deactivate the traps.

"They seemed to know which parts of the snares are dangerous and which are not," Mr Ohashi told the BBC.
A rat caught in a snare
A rat caught in a snare is found by researchers

In the journal Primates, the researchers describe six separate cases where chimps were observed trying to deactivate snares.

Mostly, the chimps grasped the snare stick with their hands, shaking it violently until the trap broke.

Sometimes a chimp lightly knocked the sapling that holds the snare, before grasping it to break the trap.

But in all cases, they avoided touching the dangerous part, the wire loop.

In the video above, chimp can be seen seeking out and inspecting snares, without breaking them.

Life-saving skills

"We were surprised when we found this behaviour," says Mr Ohashi.

"This is the first report of chimpanzees breaking snares without injury."

The chimps' actions may also reveal something important about how chimps learn.

Often, chimps acquire new talents by trial and error.

For example, when trying to crack nuts, they might strike one stone onto an anvil stone and miss the nuts all together. Or they might use their hands to strike the nut, which is ineffective.

SOURCES

Visit the journal Primates to read more about the snare-breaking chimps

But the Bossou chips couldn't have learned how to deactivate the snares this way, as one mistake could be fatal.

"The observations indicate that chimpanzees can learn some manners without trial and error," says Mr Ohashi.

The researchers speculate that the chimps may have learnt how the snares work by observing them over time, and this information has been passed down generations.

During one case, a juvenile male watched an adult male deactivate a snare, before then moving in to handle it once it was safe.

The researchers caution that snares remain a significant threat to wild chimps, and they are leading conservation efforts to scan the forest for the traps and remove them.

They also say that chimps in other regions do not appear so far to have also learnt how to outwit human hunters in this way.

 

[ramonmercado]

The book bonobos deserve
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/cultu ... serve.html
10:24 10 September 2010
Books
lr nursery b 024.jpg

(Image: Vanessa Woods)

Vanessa Woods, contributor

I had been spending a fair bit of time studying bonobos at a sanctuary in Congo, so somehow I missed Sara Gruen's runaway bestseller Water For Elephants, which is now being made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattison. So this year I was ready and anxiously awaiting the arrival of Ape House, Gruen's new novel, and one of the few works of fiction ever written about bonobos.

Writing a novel about bonobos is like trying to write about unicorns - most people don't know they exist. However, unlike unicorns, bonobos are very real. They are our closest living relatives, along with chimpanzees, and share 98.7 per cent of our DNA. But while chimpanzees are male dominated and occasionally beat their females and kill each other, bonobos are female dominated and their society has relatively little violence.

ape_house.JPGThe biggest accomplishment of Ape House is that it brings bonobos to life. The writing is effortless, as though Gruen sat down and wrote the book in one breezy afternoon. But don't be deceived. The amount of research that went into accurately portraying these rare, gentle apes is enormous. Gruen places her apes in a language research institute - and covering the basics of non-human language is a task that would intimidate most scientists.

The Ape House bonobos are exceptional communicators. Like several real life apes before them, they use American Sign Language in a range of novel contexts, providing perhaps our most extensive and intimate experience with the thoughts and emotions of another species. Gruen spent time with the bonobos Kanzi and Panbinisha at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, and some of her experiences are clearly portrayed in the book (Kanzi is notorious, like Ape House's Bonzi, for being very particular about how his coffee is made).

Ape House begins with a dramatic kidnapping of the bonobos from their home at the language institute. They eventually turn up as stars in a reality television series, because - wait for it - bonobos have a lot of sex. If you think this is an outlandish idea, think again. I once had an excited documentary producer suggest that we simultaneously film the sanctuary bonobos and a house full of fraternity boys. I believe the producer's exact words were, "The bonobos will be having sex while the guys are having sex - it'll be great!"

Sex is an important mechanism of bonobo society - it functions as both conflict management and tension relief. If bonobos feel threatened or anxious, they have sex. In most cases the sex is not erotic, it's as casual and friendly as a handshake. Unfortunately, it is probably the reason why no one knows about them. Because of the bonobo handshake, these apes are rarely featured in documentaries. They are occasionally left off the phylogenetic tree. Even scientists, who should know better, frequently only talk about our one closest living relative, the chimpanzee.

Gruen admirably portrays the bonobos as being as puzzled at our sexual proclivities as we are with theirs. Frustrated with the lack of sex going on in the bonobo house, the reality television mogul, who is a porn king, orders a blow up doll to be delivered to the 'Ape House'. The bonobos tenderly cover her with a blanket.

At a recent study we conducted at Duke University, only 25% of people knew bonobos were a great ape, compared to 80% of people who knew that chimpanzees were. After the success of Water For Elephants, it's almost a given that Ape House will be read by thousands of people, bringing bonobos out of the closet and into the spotlight where they belong.

Vanessa Woods is the author of Bonobo Handshake, published in May. She conducts research on bonobo psychology at Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary in Congo.