10:35 12 March 2009 by Ewen Callaway
If you're ever lost in the jungle, follow a chimpanzee. New research suggests the great apes keep a geometric mental map of their home range, moving from point to point in nearly straight lines.
"The kind of striking thing when you are with the chimpanzees in the forest is that we use a compass or GPS, but obviously these guys know where they are going," says Christophe Boesch, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
With the aid of GPS, he and colleague Emmanuelle Normand shadowed the movements of 15 chimpanzees in Côte d'Ivoire's Taï National Park for a total of 217 days.
In a given day, a single animal might visit 15 of the roughly 12,000 trees in its 17-square-kilometre range, Boesch says. "They are kind of nomads."
Full story at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16744-chimps-use-geometry-to-navigate-the-jungle.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!