Orangutan infants learn survival skills through observation and practice
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Researchers in Indonesia studied 21 Sumatran orangutans from birth to independence, around 8.5 years old, to understand how they learn to find food.
The Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior team used nearly 4,700 hours of observation to connect learning behaviors with the variety of foods the orangutans eventually ate. They focused on “peering,” when orangutans watch others, and exploration of the rainforest as indicators of social and individual learning.
The scientists discovered that young orangutans learned through both social learning, watching their mothers and other orangutans, and individual learning, exploring their surroundings. While all the infants engaged in social learning more often, each orangutan showed different preferences for these two methods. Each instance of an orangutan watching another sparked over two hours of subsequent exploration.
The study revealed that orangutans with high rates of both social and individual learning developed the broadest diets at independence, consuming nearly 250 distinct food items. Conversely, orangutans with low rates of both learning methods had the narrowest diets. Researchers at Universitas Nasional in Indonesia now intend to investigate whether greater learning translates into improved energy intake, survival, and reproduction in these animals.
