Apr. 10,
2013 — Fruit-eating animals are known to use their spatial memory to
relocate fruit, yet, it is unclear how they manage to find fruit in the first
place. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in
Leipzig, Germany,
have now investigated which strategies chimpanzees in the Taï
National Park in Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa,
use in order to find fruit in the rain forest. The result: Chimpanzees know
that trees of certain species produce fruit simultaneously and use this
botanical knowledge during their daily search for fruit.
To investigate
if chimpanzees know that if a tree is carrying fruit, then other trees of the
same species are likely to carry fruit as well, the researchers conducted
observations of their inspections, i.e. the visual checking of fruit
availability in tree crowns. They focused their analyses on recordings in which
they saw chimpanzees inspect empty trees, when they made "mistakes."
By analysing
these "mistakes," the researchers were able to exclude that sensory
cues of fruit had triggered the inspection and were the first to learn that
chimpanzees had expectations of finding fruit days before feeding on it. They,
in addition, significantly increased their expectations of finding fruit after
tasting the first fruit in season. "They did not simply develop a 'taste'
for specific fruit on which they had fed frequently," says Karline
Janmaat. "Instead, inspection probability was predicted by a particular
botanical feature -- the level of synchrony in fruit production of the species
of encountered trees."
Posts
