Do you peel bananas from the highest or backside? One elephant goes with a 3rd possibility.
When handed a barely browning banana, Pang Pha, an Asian elephant at Zoo Berlin, will use her trunk to interrupt the fruit, shake the pulp onto the bottom, discard the peel after which shove the pulp into her mouth, researchers report within the April 10 Present Biology. The uncommon habits, beforehand recorded in just some elephants, might assist make clear how the animals study advanced actions.
When a zookeeper first instructed neuroscientist Lena Kaufmann of Humboldt College of Berlin that one of many elephants peeled bananas, she determined to try it out for herself. For weeks, Kaufmann and colleagues couldn’t get Pang Pha to copy the habits. That’s as a result of the way in which the elephant eats bananas appears to rely on ripeness.
Pang Pha ate inexperienced and yellow bananas entire — peel and all. It was solely when Kaufmann supplied the mild big a brown-spotted banana that she revealed her peeling prowess. However the fruit can’t be too brown, Kaufmann’s group discovered. Pang Pha rejected utterly brown bananas. Initially she would place them gently on the bottom in protest. Now she throws them apart.
Within the firm of different elephants, Pang Pha surprisingly ate most yellow-brown bananas entire. She sometimes saved her peeling trick for the final banana throughout a social feeding session.
Pang Pha could have developed the peeling skill by observing her human caretakers, the researchers suspect. Elephants studying behaviors from individuals is extraordinarily uncommon, the group says, particularly a habits this advanced. Not one of the different elephants on the zoo — together with Pang Pha’s daughter — have been noticed peeling bananas. That implies the ability isn’t simply discovered from elephant to elephant.
The brand new research exhibits the worth of finding out particular person animals, Kaufmann says. “There’s such a wealthy panorama of behaviors that we lose if we solely take a look at what all elephants have in widespread,” she says. “If you happen to take a look at every particular person elephant, you’ll be able to see that they’re capable of do actually superb issues.”
