Mom Y Sumatran orangutan calf (I put abelii) will remain connected until Nine years, more than any other non-human mammal. During this time, these great apes depend on their parents to learn how to lead their lives, looking for what to eat and how to get that food, before becoming independent.
A new study has focused on the role of mothers and shows for the first time that women are actually active teachers.
However, unlike us, orangutan mothers do not seem to be actively involved in this. Learningbut behaved like passive models, whose behaviors were reproduced by their children, according to previous research, from the acquisition of skills from the children’s point of view.
A new study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, focused on the role of mothers and shows for the first time that women really are active teachers.
The team of researchers from Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior from Constance (Germany) found that when orangutan mothers seek snack, adapt their behavior to the age and abilities of their young people, thus helping them to learn new skills socially.
The work raises the possibility that orangutans carry out the teaching – a rare behavior among animals – and sheds light on the factors that led to the evolution of teaching in humans.
learn to look for food
During the weaning period, which usually occurs at age eight or nine – one of the longest periods of nutritional dependence on any mammal – young orangutans must learn to recognize and process more than what they do. 200 foods, many of which require several steps before being consumed.
Young orangutans must learn to recognize and process more than 200 foods, many of which require several steps before being consumed.
For example, easy-to-eat flowers and leaves do not need any treatment, while the bark must be detached from the tree and scraped off with your teeth to extract the nourishing parts. The toughest products require Tools, like sticks that turn into brushes to dig the Honey of the hives.
Until now, it was thought that the way they learned these complex skills foraging it was watching and seeing their mothers do that and ordering food. But a mystery remained: was this learning process really one-sided?
“It was disconcerting to see mothers always seem so passive during these feeding interactions,” she says. Caroline Schuppli, from the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior, leader of the work.
“Mothers spend a lot of time with their puppies and maintain a very close connection, but they never seemed to actively participate in the acquisition of their abilities”, adds the specialist, who lacks data to fully understand this relationship. In fact, “we didn’t know the role of the model”.
Active help from mothers
To do this, Schuppli has partnered with researchers from the University of Zurich (Switzerland), the Universitas Nasional (Indonesia) and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Germany) to collect data on the role of the mother in the development of abilities of children’s children. They analyzed data from 1,300 food orders by 27 young Sumatran orangutans over twelve years in the Suaq Balimbing area of Sumatra, Indonesia.
For each event, it was scored whether the mother allowed the calf to take the food or not, and then it was analyzed with information on the age of each individual who asked for the food and the properties of the product itself.
When puppies request food, mothers adjust their tolerance according to the age of the offspring (ie, based on their competence levels) and according to the difficulty of processing the food.
The results showed that orangutan mothers respond to their offspring during feeding and therefore facilitate feeding. learning opportunities: When young people order food, mothers adjust their tolerance according to the age of their children (ie, according to their competence levels) and according to the difficulty of processing the food.
mothers show the eldest tolerance levels when your young people acquire food recognition and handling skills, as well as when dealing with products that are difficult to process with tools. In the latter case, parents remain tolerant throughout their children’s period of dependence. With leaves They can be picked up and eaten whole, have lower overall tolerance levels and stop being shared when the calf reaches a certain age.
“Our results suggest that mothers actively participate in their children’s skills learning, but they do so.reactively and not proactively. Interestingly, there were very few cases where food was actively shared. This means that younger orangutans have to take the initiative during their apprenticeship”, emphasizes Schuppli.
According to the authors, it remains to be seen whether the mothers’ behavioral adjustments can be classified as functional teaching. “These discoveries give us a special insight into the factors that lead to the evolution of teaching”, says the scientist. “Although this is quite rare in the animal kingdom, the work shows that these orangutans have at least some cognitive, ecological and social conditions to support their teaching capacity”, he concludes.
Reference:
Mulati Mikeliban et al. “Orangutan mothers adjust their behavior during food requests in a way that is likely to facilitate the acquisition of feeding skills in their children” Scientific Reports
Source: SYNC
Rights: Creative Commons.
.
