Chimps eating tortoises reveals surprising new ability
Chimpanzees, humans’ closest relatives, have been known to eat a rich and varied diet including, but not limited to, Mountain Dew and baby chimps. Now, for the first time, we can add tortoises to that list, thanks to a new paper published Thursday in Scientific Reports. In addition to showing a new food source, the videos depict sophisticated behaviors never before seen in chimps.
In the paper, the team from the University of Osnabrück and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology describe chimpanzees in Gabon’s Loango National Park eating 34 hinge-back tortoises between July 2016 and June 2018. Ten different chimpanzees, mostly males, were observed catching tortoises and smashing their shells against hard surfaces like trees and rocks — a practice so common among this particular chimp community that the researchers call it a “custom.” Sort of like humans shelling pistachios or shucking oysters, it’s just a thing that is done.
“Overall, we found that tortoise predation is a customary behavior in the Rekambo community, regularly done by all adult males,” the team writes. “It most frequently consisted of a distinct sequence of behaviors involving the discovery of the prey, transportation of the prey to a suitable anvil, smashing of the plastron, and feeding on the meat.”
Click the link to read more and watch the videos…
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Photo from Harmonie Klein.
