Chimps Found Deactivating Snares Set By Human Bushmeat Hunters
by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY on 09. 3.10
Science & Technology (science)
Go chimps, go! An interesting new paper in the journal Primates documents how a group of chimpanzees in Bossou, Guinea have been successfully deactivating snares set by human bushmeat hunters. Though not always successful, the scientists observed the behavior in five juvenile to adult males. Compared to the rate of injuries from snares to chimps--which aren't the target of these hunters, it should be noted--across Africa as a whole, this group in Guinea has remarkably lower casualties.
To deactivate the snares, which generally consist of a loop of iron wire connected by a vine rope to a nearby sapling, the chimps grasp the snare stick with their hands and shake it until the snare breaks. Other times the chimps knock the sapling before having a go at the snare stick. However, in all cases the chimps avoid touching the wire loop, which they apparently know is the dangerous part.
In the discussion part of the paper, the researchers note,
Snare deactivation by chimpanzees has not been observed at other study sites. This presents a puzzle, because snare injuries continue to be a problem threatening these animals across Africa. One possible explanation for its occurrence at Bossou is the long history during which chimpanzees and humans have coexisted. Long-term exposure to snares may have allowed Bossou chimpanzees to learn about the dangers associated with them, and possibly how to interact safely with and eventually deactivate them.
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This really goes to show how intelligent our primate cousins are. And there were people who say only humans use tools. It's a shame that people set such indiscriminate traps that endanger so many different species, but that's Africa for you.
There are seriously people who still think that only humans use tools? That's fifty years behind the times. Seriously? Are we talking about a few crazies who also believe that the world is flat and the Jewish Illuminati Homosexuals are controlling the banks, or ninety year old people who have gone senile and can't remember anything after 1959?
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Mayabird wrote:There are seriously people who still think that only humans use tools? That's fifty years behind the times. Seriously? Are we talking about a few crazies who also believe that the world is flat and the Jewish Illuminati Homosexuals are controlling the banks, or ninety year old people who have gone senile and can't remember anything after 1959?
I said there were. Though knowing how uneducated the general populace is, there probably still are.
Heh...wait fifty more years and they'll start ambushing the poachers
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Mayabird wrote:There are seriously people who still think that only humans use tools? That's fifty years behind the times. Seriously? Are we talking about a few crazies who also believe that the world is flat and the Jewish Illuminati Homosexuals are controlling the banks, or ninety year old people who have gone senile and can't remember anything after 1959?
Yeah well its not like you would know unless you looked for the info, they don't exactly play "ravens use tools" 24/7 on Fox News. I probably wouldn't know about it if it weren't for the board and the dentists National Geographic.
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I for one welcome our new ape overlords. GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME YOU DAMNED DIRTY APE!
Interesting question is how they first learned it. A single ape wouldn't have learned that snares = bad without personal experience. And more apes wouldn't know about it if that first ape - call him ape zero - didn't communicate it to his buddies. So, does this mean an ape survived getting snared and learned that snares bad? That an ape saw his buddy being snared and learned that snares bad? How does the learning process go? How is this knowledge passed on and practiced?
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN! Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic Pink Sugar Heart Attack!
Apes learn by imitation, they do not teach skills to others. It most probably was one ape watching a buddy get snared, and then started tossing objects at other snares to make them go off. Others watched him, and so it went around. There are some good documentaries around about how apes learn and how they cooperate - they even know when not to cooperate (test where one ape will get nothing of the reward - he is only fooled once, and then he will not cooperate on this particular test anymore...)
A minute's thought suggests that the very idea of this is stupid. A more detailed examination raises the possibility that it might be an answer to the question "how could the Germans win the war after the US gets involved?" - Captain Seafort, in a thread proposing a 1942 'D-Day' in Quiberon Bay
My sympathies definitely lie with the chimpanzees - although I hope that this doesn't lead to a move to nastier hunting methods on the humans' part. It would be very nice if "bushmeat" became a thing of the past...it smacks of cannibalism, at least to my mind.
LaCroix wrote:Apes learn by imitation, they do not teach skills to others.
Seems to me that if one ape demonstrates a given technique and other apes learn by imitating, that would place the demonstrating ape in the position of teacher-of-a-skill to the others...
I find myself endlessly fascinated by your career - Stark, in a fit of Nerd-Validation, November 3, 2011
Kanastrous wrote:Seems to me that if one ape demonstrates a given technique and other apes learn by imitating, that would place the demonstrating ape in the position of teacher-of-a-skill to the others...
The fundamental difference between teaching and what apes do is that the "teacher" ape doesn't slow down or care for his pupil. He just continues doing what he does, because he wants to do it right now, and not because he wants to teach them skills. The others are left to figure out what he does and how to copy the feat. The difference might seem minuscule, but it is essential, and also the reason why humans are more effective teachers when it comes to complex skills- we want the other to learn it and take steps to faciliate that.
A minute's thought suggests that the very idea of this is stupid. A more detailed examination raises the possibility that it might be an answer to the question "how could the Germans win the war after the US gets involved?" - Captain Seafort, in a thread proposing a 1942 'D-Day' in Quiberon Bay
What about mother chimps whose offspring learn (for example) termite-catching tricks, from her? The footage I have seen of that behavior sure looks like the mother is attentive to her young picking up the skill. Although maybe I'm just giving in to the urge to anthropomorphize.
I find myself endlessly fascinated by your career - Stark, in a fit of Nerd-Validation, November 3, 2011
As far as I am in the know, the mother usually just does it, and doesn't hinder the little one to try as well, but she wouldn't give him the right tool, or help him to insert it. She would just continue to eat termites, and occasionally look at the little one. Teaching would imply that she show things in a way that makes them easier to follow, and gives corrections and helps. Apes don't do that.
A minute's thought suggests that the very idea of this is stupid. A more detailed examination raises the possibility that it might be an answer to the question "how could the Germans win the war after the US gets involved?" - Captain Seafort, in a thread proposing a 1942 'D-Day' in Quiberon Bay
Yeah, I did a literature search, such that is available to me, and there don't seem to be any documented cases of definite teaching recorded in chimps. The young 'uns pretty much stay within arm's reach of Mom for the first five years or so and imitate anything and everything she does (how she makes termite-catchers, how she makes the pointy stick and rams it in the hole to get a bush baby, etc.) but chimps don't do anything to the extent that, say, meerkats do.
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SDNW4 Nation: The Refuge And, on Nova Terra, Al-Stan the Totally and Completely Honest and Legitimate Weapons Dealer and Used Starship Salesman slept on a bed made of money, with a blaster under his pillow and his sombrero pulled over his face. This is to say, he slept very well indeed.
What about the most obvious explanation?
Chimps saw some human deactivate a trap.
It may have been one of the hunters or whoever else.
Deactivating animal-catching traps isn't terribly hard and a chimp would learn fast.
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The interesting part is not so much that a chimp at some point learned to deactivate it (by observation, accident, or experiment, who knows) but that the knowledge is being disseminated to other chimps.
I find myself endlessly fascinated by your career - Stark, in a fit of Nerd-Validation, November 3, 2011
Kanastrous wrote:The interesting part is not so much that a chimp at some point learned to deactivate it (by observation, accident, or experiment, who knows) but that the knowledge is being disseminated to other chimps.
That part is the easier ones. Chimps are social. If one chimp does it, others watch. Then they try themselves. Remember, we don't learn about the failure quote, only about the fact that all surviving chimps have mastered that skill. (Or not tried, yet.)
A minute's thought suggests that the very idea of this is stupid. A more detailed examination raises the possibility that it might be an answer to the question "how could the Germans win the war after the US gets involved?" - Captain Seafort, in a thread proposing a 1942 'D-Day' in Quiberon Bay
Wait, chimps make sharp sticks to spear bushbabies? Oh man, that's pretty nasty. Bush Babies! v______________v
What other predatory hunting tool use do they exhibit?
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN! Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic Pink Sugar Heart Attack!
Shroom Man 777 wrote:Wait, chimps make sharp sticks to spear bushbabies? Oh man, that's pretty nasty. Bush Babies! v______________v
That's nothing. Chimps can be pretty hard core when they feel like it. Males acting in groups have been known to tear chimp babies away from their mothers and cannibalize it as a group. Said groups have also been known to hunt down single chimps and brutally beat it to death, although cannibalistic consumption thereafter seems optional. All in all, it's some strange, violent social ritual animal behaviorists have yet to understand the exact purpose for.
What other predatory hunting tool use do they exhibit?
Chimpanzees have also been known to use rocks and stones as projectile weapons. They've also used rocks and stones to in the above mentioned group-hunting thing to beat their target to death after its incapacitation.
Ilya Muromets wrote:Said groups have also been known to hunt down single chimps and brutally beat it to death, although cannibalistic consumption thereafter seems optional. All in all, it's some strange, violent social ritual animal behaviorists have yet to understand the exact purpose for.
Take of this and eat, for it is my...
...never mind. Couldn't possibly be a connection.
I find myself endlessly fascinated by your career - Stark, in a fit of Nerd-Validation, November 3, 2011
Ilya Muromets wrote:Said groups have also been known to hunt down single chimps and brutally beat it to death, although cannibalistic consumption thereafter seems optional. All in all, it's some strange, violent social ritual animal behaviorists have yet to understand the exact purpose for.
Take of this and eat, for it is my...
...never mind. Couldn't possibly be a connection.
Might want to hush that up before some Christian crazy gets ahold of it. "Look, look, even chimpanzees know of the Lord!"
As for chimpanzees not possessing the tendency to teach: presumably, our own ancestors didn't always have that behavior. It seems a reasonable refinement of learning by imitation, and not necessarily one that takes all that long to develop.
Shroom Man 777 wrote:Wait, chimps make sharp sticks to spear bushbabies? Oh man, that's pretty nasty. Bush Babies! v______________v
What other predatory hunting tool use do they exhibit?
The male hunting (which is done without tools, just fingernails, teeth and lots of violence) has been known for a bit longer, both hunting for red colobus monkeys and attacking other chimps. The pointy sticks for bush babies is a new discovery (or possibly new innovation for the chimps) and notable because 1) it's done by females, and 2) it's hunting with tools, and 3) they now have the technology of pointy sticks!
DPDarkPrimus is my boyfriend!
SDNW4 Nation: The Refuge And, on Nova Terra, Al-Stan the Totally and Completely Honest and Legitimate Weapons Dealer and Used Starship Salesman slept on a bed made of money, with a blaster under his pillow and his sombrero pulled over his face. This is to say, he slept very well indeed.
I know they were vicious animals and hunted other animals and each other, but the idea of them using tools to kill was, yeah. So it is new. Okay. Man, and disturbing.
You know what's the best/worst thing about this? It's not that it's violent or horrible, or it displays their great intelligence.
It's just that it makes them more human.
^_______________^
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN! Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic Pink Sugar Heart Attack!
a) bigger pointy stick
b) something with stones
c) fire
A minute's thought suggests that the very idea of this is stupid. A more detailed examination raises the possibility that it might be an answer to the question "how could the Germans win the war after the US gets involved?" - Captain Seafort, in a thread proposing a 1942 'D-Day' in Quiberon Bay
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