2023-07-12 16:45:45
Orangutans are dependent on their mothers for longer than any other non-human animal. They nurse their young until they are at least six years old. Then, the little orangutans continue to live with their mothers for several more years, learning to find, choose and process the many different types of food they eat. There comes a day when orangutans begin their independent life and go to live far from the place where they were raised. In your new place of residence, it is not uncommon for the food available to be very different from what was usual in your land of origin. Without the guidance of their mothers, how do they learn what to eat in their new land and how to eat it?
Recent research has found the answer to that question.
The international team of Julia Mörchen, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, analyzed 30 years of observations, collected by 157 trained observers, on 77 migrant adult males of the highly sociable Sumatran orangutan Pongo abelii at the Suaq research station. Balimbing, in southwestern Aceh, Sumatra, and 75 migrant adult males of the less sociable Bornean orangutan Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii at the Tuanan Research Station in Central Borneo.
Mörchen and his colleagues focused on all those cases in which these orangutan males carefully observed what their conspecifics located less than 50 meters away were doing.
The analysis of all these cases has led the study authors to a clear conclusion. Broadly speaking, it can be said that immigrant male orangutans heed the saying that says “Where you go, do what you see”, that is, they try to do the same as they see the local population of the place they have arrived do.
Two orangutans of the species Pongo abelii carefully observe each other. The one on the left is an immigrant male. The other is a local teenage female. (Photo: Caroline Schuppli, SUAQ Project, www.suaq.org. CC BY)
Specifically, these immigrant male orangutans learn what new foods are available to them and how it is most practical to eat them by seeing how local individuals select such foods and how they eat them.
The study is titled “Migrant orangutan males use social learning to adapt to new habitat after dispersal”. And it has been published in the academic journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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