3rd Year Special Annual Double Issue Vol 4 Issue 1 & 2 Jan - Apr 2 3rd Year Special Annual Double Issue Vol 4 Issue | Page 108

ADVENTURE & WILDLIFE
Orangutans make complex
economic decisions about tool use
F
lexible tool use is closely
associated to higher mental
processes such as the ability
to plan actions. Now a group of
cognitive
biologists
and
comparative psychologists from
the University of Vienna, the
University of St Andrews and the
University of Veterinary Medicine
Vienna that included Isabelle
Laumer and Josep Call, has
studied tool related decision-
making in a non-human primate
species -- the orangutan. They
found that the apes carefully
weighed
their
options:
eat
an immediately available food
reward or wait and use a tool
to obtain a better reward instead?
To do so the apes considered
the details such as differences in
108
quality between the two food
rewards and the functionality of the
available tools in order to obtain
a high quality food reward, even
when
multidimensional
task
components had to be assessed
simultaneously.
Tool-use in animals is a rare and
often quickly rated as intelligent
due to its striking nature. For
instance, antlions throw small
pebbles
at
potential
prey,
archer fish down prey by spitting
water at them, and sea otters
use stones to crack open shells.
Nevertheless, most types of
tool use are quite inflexible,
typically applied to one situation
and
tightly
controlled
by
processes that are a part of the
Vol 4 | Issue 2 |Mar - Apr 2019