AssetID: 52869967
Headline: Migrant Orangutans Learn Dining Skills From New Pals
Caption: **RAW VIDEO** Migrant orangutans get dining lessons from their hosts in a new group. Researchers analysed 30 years of observations on a total of 152 male migrant orangutans on Sumatra and Borneo and showed evidence that great apes who have moved from one area and colony to another, learn about unfamiliar foods in their new home by ‘peering’ at experienced locals: intensely observing them at close distance. Peering was most frequently seen when locals consumed foods that were rare or hard to process Orangutans are dependent on their mothers longer than any other non-human animal, nursing until they are at least six years old and living with her for up to three years more, learning how to find, choose, and process the exceedingly varied range of foods they eat. But orangutans that have left their mothers and now live far from their natal ranges face a problem. Where the available foods may be very different, decide what to eat and figure out how to eat it. Now, an international team of authors has shown that in such cases, migrants follow the rule ‘when in Rome, do as the Romans do’. The results are published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. “Here we show evidence that migrant orangutan males use observational social learning to learn new ecological knowledge from local individuals after dispersing to a new area,” said Julia Mörchen, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Leipzig, in Germany, and the study’s lead author. “Our results suggest that migrant males not only learn where to find food and what to feed on from locals, but also continue to learn how to process these new foods.” Mörchen and colleagues showed that migrant males learn this information through a behavior called ‘peering’: intensely observing a role model for at least five seconds and from within two meters. Typically, peering orangutans face the role model and showed signs of following his or her actions with head movements, indicating attentive interest. Male orangutans migrate to another area after becoming independent, while females tend to settle close to their natal home range. “What we don’t yet know is how far orangutan males disperse, or where they disperse to. But it’s possible to make informed guesses: genetic data and observations of orangutans crossing physical barriers such as rivers and mountains suggest long-distance dispersal, likely over tens of kilometers,” said Mörchen. “This implies that during migration, males likely come across several habitat types and thus experience a variety of faunistic compositions, especially when crossing through habitats of different altitudes. Over evolutionary time, being able to quickly adapt to novel environments by attending to crucial information from locals, likely provided individuals with a survival advantage. As a result, this ability is likely ancestral in our hominin lineage, reaching back at least between 12 and 14 million years to the last common ancestor we share with orangutans.” The authors analysed 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 Balimbing research station in Southwest Aceh, and 75 adult migrant males of the less sociable Bornean orangutan Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii at the Tuanan station in Central Kalimantan. They focused on every observation of peering behavior during 4,009 occasions when these males were within 50 metres of one or more neighbors, who could be adult females, juveniles, or adult males.
Keywords: orangutans,migrants,animals,natural world,nature,apes,feature,science
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