This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Orangutan infants spend their first eight years with their mothers, and throughout this time, they can draw on their knowledge. After that, however, orangutans are entirely on their own.
To fare well as independent orangutans, infants need to learn many survival skills, arguably the most important of which are feeding skills. An adult orangutan's diet consists of nearly 250 distinct food items chosen from thousands of different options, some potentially toxic, in the vast maze of the rainforest. Before they set out on their own, infants must also learn how foods should be processed and when and where foods can be found in the forest.
"How do infants master this complex diet curriculum in those first years?" asks Dr. Revathe Thillaikumar, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. Throughout our evolutionary history, humans had to learn an immense set of skills necessary for survival over many years of development.
Many of these skills, such as knowledge of new food sources or hunting techniques, are learned from one's culture through a complex interplay of different forms of social and individual learning. "But until now, whether and how wild animals use different forms of learning to develop their survival-relevant skills has remained unknown," she says. In a new study, Thillaikumar and colleagues show that wild orangutans build their broad diet profiles through a similarly fascinating interplay of social and individual learning during infancy.
The study, published in Science and led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB) in Germany, is the first to show that multiple forms of learning interact over many years to build broad, survival-relevant ecological skills in a wild great ape. Researchers agree that many animals need learning to acquire skills necessary for survival in the wild. However, it is debated to what extent animals learn from others (social learning) or by practicing themselves (individual learning).
Answering this is challenging, especially in long-lived species like great apes. "To really understand how these forms of learning translate into actual skills and knowledge, we needed to link learning events to concrete, measurable outcomes like diet. But because orangutans develop so slowly, there is a multiyear lag between learning and measurable behavioral change," says Dr.
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