3rd Year Special Annual Double Issue Vol 4 Issue 1 & 2 Jan - Apr 2 3rd Year Special Annual Double Issue Vol 4 Issue | Page 109

ADVENTURE & WILDLIFE
respective animal’s inborn behavioural
repertoire. In contrast, intelligent tool
use requires the integration of multiple
sources of information to flexibly adapt
to
quickly
changing
environmental
conditions.
Orangutans share 97 percent of their
DNA with us and are among the most
intelligent
and
most
endangered
primates. They have human-like long-
term memory, routinely use a variety of
sophisticated tools in the wild and
construct
elaborate
sleeping
nests
each night from foliage and branches.
In their natural habitat, the evergreen
rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra,
orangutans have to consider several
factors simultaneously, such as the
predictability to find ripe fruits, the
distance and reachability of food as
well as the available tools to open
extractable food sources. So far it was
unknown how orangutans adapt their
decisions when the use of a tool is
involved and how many factors they can
process at the same time in order to make
profitable decisions. profitable decisions at the Wolfgang
Koehler Primate Research Center in Leipzig.
Researchers from the University of
Vienna, the University of Veterinary
Medicine Vienna and the University
of St Andrews investigated for the
first
time
how
orangutans
adapt
their decisions when the use of a tool is
involved and how many factors they can
process at the same time in order to make Orangutans
flexibly
adapted
their
decisions to different conditions: “If
the apple piece (likeable food) or the
banana-pellet (favourite food) was out of
immediate reach inside the apparatus and
the choice was between an immediate
banana-pellet and a tool, they chose the
food over the tool, even when the tool was
Vol 4 | Issue 2 |Mar - Apr 2019
The researchers used two different types of
food items: Banana-pellets, which are the
orangutans’ most favourite food type, and
apple pieces which they like but disregard
if banana-pellets are available. They could
extract these items from two different
apparatuses: an apparatus required
probing with a stick tool to obtain the
food item while the other required
dropping
a
ball
inside
it.
Each
apparatus could only be operated
with
the
respective
tool.
During
testing,
orang-utans
were
confronted with either one or two baited
apparatus/es and a choice between two
items (usually a food item and a tool). Once
the apes had picked one item the other was
immediately removed.
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