At six months old, human infants are still working on sitting up by themselves. But baby orangutans at that age are already developing their engineering skills.
But nest building isn’t instinctive to orangutans — it has to be learned through years of (sometimes hilarious) trial and error that start in infancy, researchers report in the May Animal Behaviour. The finding could be important for conserving populations of the critically endangered ape.
The treetops are “a dangerous place to live when you’re so big and heavy,” and a poorly made nest can spell disaster, says Andrea Permana, a primatologist at the University of Warwick in England.
To see how orangutans become expert canopy architects, Permana and her colleagues tracked the development of 27 young Sumatran orangutans at the Suaq Balimbing monitoring station in Sumatra, Indonesia, over 13 years. Those observations allowed the researchers to create detailed timeline of how nest building emerges.
2024-05-17 08:30:00
Article from www.sciencenews.org