Cameras Capture Adult Chimpanzees Passing Tools—and Know-How—to Their Young, Teaching Important Skills to the Next Generation

They’re known to use sticks to “fish” for ants and algae, make sponges from moss or leaves, and fashion simple spears for hunting. But exactly how the animals pick up these skills—and from whom—is still a matter of debate. Now, scientists have captured footage of adult wild chimps handing tools and food to juveniles—a form of teaching that facilitates the youngsters’ learning.

The findings, published September 15 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, suggest that tool and food transfers, along with other social learning mechanisms, are critical for the next generation of chimpanzees to master tool-use skills. In the study, Sánchez-Megías and colleagues analyzed footage from wildlife cameras in the Dindefelo Community Nature Reserve in Senegal. The cameras had been installed at 14 locations where wild western chimpanzees had previously been spotted using tools.

The nearly 15 hours of footage, captured between 2017 and 2025, documented 33 total instances of tool transfer between chimps: 19 times while they were using sticks to fish for ants, ten while they were fishing for algae and four while they were fishing for termites. The researchers also analyzed 30 minutes of footage from 11 sites where chimpanzees were known to bash baobab fruit onto stones to crack open their hard shells and reveal the tasty pulp and seeds inside. This behavior is considered “proto-tool use,” since the animals are not directly manipulating the stones, according to the scientists.

The team recorded four instances of food transfer, when one chimpanzee handed a baobab fruit to another. Most objects were passed between relatives, and mothers accounted for the largest share of those transfers, handing tools to their offspring in 30 percent of the observations. Most of the chimps giving up their tools—58 percent—were adults, while infants made up the largest share of recipients at 42 percent.

In one instance, captured on video in February 2018, a mother named Soukki stuck a stick into an ant nest, then grabbed her daughter Saïsaï and brought her to the stick. Saïsaï then removed the stick and ate the ants attached to it. In another, recorded in December 2021, a mother named Féré gathered baobab fruits and placed them near her son, an infant called Fotti, on a rocky outcropping.

Fotti playfully attempted to pound one of the fruits against the rock but wasn’t successful at cracking it open. A juvenile male—possibly an older brother—then came over and began bashing the fruit against the rock as “Fotti sat down and attentively observed the juvenile’s movements,” the researchers write in the paper. When the juvenile cracked open the baobab fruit, Fotti ate a piece of it.