A chimpanzee’s challenge is not so much to find food plants but to find those that actually produce food
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MimiA
scientist, moderator
New work from MPIer Karline Janmaat and colleagues "Spatio-temporal complexity of chimpanzee food: How cognitive adaptations can counteract the ephemeral nature of ripe fruit."
"Using up to 20 years of information on the monthly availability of young leaves, unripe and ripe fruits in three tropical forests in East, Central and West Africa, we estimate how difficult it is for chimpanzees to find food and to predict its availability in individual trees. Our study revealed a chimpanzee’s challenge is not so much to find food plants, since they are surprisingly abundant, but to find those that actually produce food. Calculations revealed that chimpanzees were 17 times more challenged to find ripe fruit, the most energy-rich food source, than unripe fruit. Moreover, trees with large crops of ripe fruit were at least nine times scarcer than other trees: in old growth forests only one large ripe fruit crop was encountered every 10 kilometers of straight-line travel, on average. We discuss what cognitive strategies chimpanzees may use in gaining privileged access to their most energy-rich but ephemeral food."
Press Release: http://www.mpg.de/9852278/chimpanzee-fruit-distribution
Paper Here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajp.22527/abstract
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jwidness
moderator
Very interesting, thanks Mimi!
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AnLand
moderator
I needed some time to find that comment from @Bohe from the field team again. But I found it. 😃 In this discussion http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/boards/BCP000000o/discussions/DCP0000g98 about what would later become Olive (with Tassilo), we already discussed that she is (twice within a week) peering into that treetop. Bohe mentioned that (if he remembers right) it is a fig tree. Is that what you mean with inspection?
Videos for faster access: ACP0006kno, ACP0006knp, ACP0006knq, ACP0006knr and ACP0006kro
There is one more (for me also Olive and Tassilo, but not confirmed) where the female is peering up and then decides to climb the other tree with her dorsal infant. ACP00071wm and ACP00071wn
If that's the case, what tag would be good, e.g., inspect_tree (non-specific)?
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MimiA
scientist, moderator
HI @AnLand, its really hard to say without context if this is inspection or not. Usually the chimps will test the fruit if they are inspecting but there can be more subtle cues as well. Even in this case it can be that they are looking at some other animal (or another chimp) in the tree. I even would say that maybe she is just resting and looking around, so i would hesitate to draw too many conclusions here as to what she is looking at.
In Karline's paper - she considered inspection anytime a chimp walked by a tree and looked up (even while in motion) as long as there was no animal in the tree (which she could control for because she was there). This was done since we aren't entirely sure what cues chimps are taking from their environment to assess fruit availability, so this seemed liked the most conservative approach. For our purposes however i think we have too much uncertainty to be able to tag this as anything meaningful. Of course you are welcome to make a collection if you think its interesting!
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AnLand
moderator
in response to MimiA's comment.
Thanks! I will start a collection. It will be hard to determine what they are looking for, but they are looking at or for something. It does not look like random.
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MimiA
scientist, moderator
in response to AnLand's comment.
I'm not sure, she could be listening rather than looking...
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AnLand
moderator
in response to MimiA's comment.
Ok, no problem, I will delete the small collection to avoid confusion.
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MimiA
scientist, moderator
Sorry @AnLand, I did not imply you should delete the collection, I will try to be more clear in the future. All I was saying is that in my opinion, I am not sure that "they are looking at or for something". - you are of course allowed to make whatever collections you want!
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AnLand
moderator
in response to MimiA's comment.
No problem, I just had this thought. You're probably right. 😃
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AnLand
moderator
For all German speaking volunteers here: The Tagesanzeiger (a Swiss newspaper) had today a great article describing the here mentioned research from Karline Janmaat - Smart early risers in the jungle. Thanks to @Dana23 for the link!
Für alle deutschsprachigen Teilnehmer hier: der Züricher Tagesanzeiger brachte heute einen interessanten Artikel zur oben beschriebenen Forschung von Karline Janmaat: Clevere Frühaufsteher im Dschungel. Vielen Dank an @Dana23 für den Link!
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