More menu choices: Migrant orangutans learn a lot about food by watching
the locals

Date:
July 10, 2023
Source:
Universita"t Leipzig
Summary:
Migrant male orangutans on Borneo and Sumatra learn about
unfamiliar foods in their new home range by 'peering' at experienced
locals: intensely observing them at close range. This is what an
international research team found out in a long-term study with
152 male animals observed over a period of 30 years. Peering was
most frequently seen when locals consumed foods that were rare or
hard to process.


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FULL STORY ========================================================================== Migrant male orangutans on Borneo and Sumatra learn about unfamiliar foods
in their new home range by 'peering' at experienced locals: intensely
observing them at close range. This is what an international research team
led by Leipzig University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig found out in a long-term study with 152 male
animals observed over a period of 30 years. Peering was most frequently
seen when locals consumed foods that were rare or hard to process. The
results have been published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Orangutans are dependent on their mothers longer than any other non-human animal, nursing until they are at least six years old and living with her
for up to three more years, learning how to find, choose, and process the exceedingly varied range of foods they eat. But how do orangutans that
have left their mothers and now live far from their natal ranges, where
the available foods may be very different, decide what to eat and figure
out how to eat it? Now, an international team of authors has shown that in
such cases, migrants follow the rule 'observe, and do as the locals do'.

"Here we show evidence that migrant orangutan males use observational
social learning to learn new ecological knowledge from local individuals
after dispersing to a new area," says Julia Mo"rchen, a doctoral student
at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Leipzig University, in Germany, and the study's lead author. "Our results suggest
that migrant males not only learn where to find food and what to feed on
from locals, but also continue to learn how to process these new foods." Mo"rchen and colleagues showed that migrant males learn this information through a behaviour called 'peering': intensely observing for at least
five seconds and from within two metres at a role model. Typically,
peering orangutans faced the role model and showed signs of following
his or her actions with head movements, indicating attentive interest.

Male orangutans migrate to another area after becoming independent,
while females tend to settle close to their natal home range. "What
we don't yet know is how far orangutan males disperse, or where they
disperse to. But it's possible to make informed guesses: genetic data
and observations of orangutans crossing physical barriers such as rivers
and mountains suggest long-distance dispersal, likely over tens of
kilometres," says Mo"rchen. "This implies that during migration, males
likely come across several habitat types and thus experience a variety
of faunistic compositions, especially when crossing through habitats of different altitudes. Over evolutionary time, being able to quickly adapt
to novel environments by attending to crucial information from locals,
likely provided individuals with a survival advantage. As a result,
this ability is likely ancestral in our hominin lineage, reaching back
between at least 12 and 14 million years to the last common ancestor
we share with orangutans." Peering by males was observed 534 times,
occurring in 207 (5.2%) of these associations. In Suaq Balimbing, males
most frequently peered at local females followed by local juveniles,
and least at adult males. In the less sociable population of Tuanan,
the opposite held: males most frequently peered at adult males, followed
by immature orangutans, and least at adult females. Migrant males at
Tuanan may lack opportunities to peer at local females, as females are
known to avoid long associations with them in this population. Migrant
males then interacted more frequently with the peered-at food afterwards, putting into practice what they had learned through peering.

"Our detailed analyses further showed that the migrant orangutan males
in our study peered most frequently at food items that are difficult to process, or which are only rarely eaten by the locals: including foods
that were only recorded being eaten for a few minutes over the entire
study period," says Dr Anja Widdig, a professor at Leipzig University
and co-senior author of the study.

The authors cautioned that it is still unknown how many times adult
orangutans need to peer at a particular behaviour before mastering
it themselves.

Observations suggest that depending on the complexity or novelty of the
learned skill, adults may still use explorative behaviours on certain
food items they first learned about through peering -- possibly to
figure out more details, strengthen and memorize the new information,
or to compare the latter with previous knowledge.

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Story Source: Materials provided by Universita"t_Leipzig. Original
written by Susann Huster.

Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Julia Mo"rchen, Frances Luhn, Olivia Wassmer, Julia A. Kunz,
Lars Kulik,
Maria A. van Noordwijk, Carel P. van Schaik, Puji Rianti,
Sri Suci Utami Atmoko, Anja Widdig, Caroline Schuppli. Migrant
orangutan males use social learning to adapt to new habitat after
dispersal. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2023; 11 DOI:
10.3389/fevo.2023.1158887 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/07/230710113816.htm

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