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- Orangutan mothers wait to trigger a danger alarm to avoid sending predators back to their location
- It took two researchers crawling in the Sumatran jungle to discover the phenomenon
- This ability can come from a common ancestor
One of the great animal mysteries has been whether or not they experience the weather like us, or they are aware of the past, present, and future. Of course, we can not ask them. As a result, we have to look for clues about their temporal perspective in behavior. Two primatologists from the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, may have just find some in the calls for warning Orangutans of Sumatra broadcast when they spot a predator. Or really, a few minutes later. This is the first time we see what appears to be an animal reacting to a past event.
Orangutans produce what are called "displaced space-time responses" and in doing so they join a very exclusive club: we do it, bees do it, and now the orangs -outans. The paper was written by Adriano Rei e Lameira and Josep Callwho studied seven Pongo Abelii mothers in the Ketambe forest in Sumatra.
Stealthy kisses
(Adriano Rei e Lameira)
Grrr, I am a predator.
The warning of orangutans is described as resembling a human kiss. To get one, the researchers crawled on all fours, covered with a leaf under females perched in trees 5 to 20 meters higher. The leaves had one of three patterns: a tiger strip, spots and a white one. (Unsurprisingly, the tiger leaf has turned out to be the scariest.) After being spotted by a woman, the scientist remained in sight for two minutes before crawling out of sight.
The first woman they found was accompanied by a 9-year-old girl and, as soon as she noticed the "predator", told Lameira Scientific Magazine"She stopped what she was doing, grabbed her baby, made her needs [a sign of distress], and started climbing slowly up the tree. She was completely silent. "The researchers waited for it to warn others." It was frustrating. Twenty minutes passed. And then she ends up doing it. "And there was no doubt about what she was doing." She called more than an hour. "
The experiment was repeated with six other women – 24 trials in total – and about half the time, a vocal warning was issued. At that time, none of them took as long as the first orangutan to sound the alarm – the average was seven minutes. And, as the first subject, they were extended warnings, averaging 1519.2 seconds, or just over 25 minutes.
Orangutans Strategy
(Axel Drainville)
It is possible that the women hesitated because they were immobilized by terror, but the researchers do not think that this is the case, because the mothers immediately presented other reactions, such as the defecation of fear, the immediate bringing together of their young and the passage to higher branches. Lameira thinks that they simply understood that triggering an instant alarm would tell the predator where to find its prey. "Because vocal alarms inherently reveal the subject's presence and position," he notes, "women seem to delay their response to minimize the perceived possibility that a predator is attempting a direct assault, in especially in the presence of an unweaned infant. " And so: "The mother considered the predator to be the most dangerous for her child and chose not to call before he left." After all, as the study says, "there was no [other] This is why the Orangutan females vocalize after the removal of a predatory model, but they did. "
If it was not a security problem, what could happen next, ask the researchers? "Conceptually explaining the observed vocal delays seems problematic, therefore, without considering the mental ability to handle the notion or memory of an encounter with a predator and / or the ability to adjust the timing of the response."
An interesting fact revealed by the data is that the younger the mother's load, the more likely it is that the alarm will sound quickly once the predator is gone. The Lamiera team infers that "this indicates that the decision to call or not to call – even after the cause has been lost for a long time – was taken in part as a measure of perceived danger to others".
Timely information
(Matej Hudovernik/ Shutterstock)
The study concludes that "delaying behavior over time and in space inherently expresses a role of high cognitive processing of stimulus and general intelligence". The authors also say: "Our results suggest that the displaced linguistic reference is likely to have originated from behaviors similar to those of an ancestral hominid". This may mean that our ability to conceptualize the past may have come to us via a common ancestor with orangutans.
It is something that deserves more study. "The lack of displaced reference evidence in orangutans, and more generally in great apes, may not reflect a lack of cognitive ability, but a limited research focus." Nevertheless, there is other similar research showing the temporal displacement of these monkeys, including the Discovery 2013 wild orangutans on board who broadcast their travel plans one day before venturing into search for partners and men from those love destinations who apparently set their own schedule accordingly.
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