Cultural differences in army ant predation by West African chimpanzees? A comparative study of microecological variables

Möbius, Yasmin; Boesch, Christophe; Koops, Kathelijne; Matsuzawa, Tetsuro; Humle, Tatyana

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.01.008

Cited by 77 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…However, tool use to gather army ants has been documented in Seringbara, which may be a response to ecological opportunities as army ants are both abundant and widespread across the area [32]. The frequency of opportunities may also be key, as the mere presence of particular ant prey does not provide a sufficient explanation for the observed patterns of chimpanzee tool use [55,56]. It has been suggested that tool use in New Caledonian crows emerged as an evolved adaptation in response to an abundance of embedded food resources for which there were no competitors [22]; importantly, foraging with tools is thought to be energetically highly rewarding, which leads us to examine the relative profitability of tool-assisted versus conventional foraging techniques.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological and social correlates of chimpanzee tool use

Sanz

Morgan

2013

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

105

146

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The emergence of technology has been suggested to coincide with scarcity of staple resources that led to innovations in the form of tool-assisted strategies to diversify or augment typical diets. We examined seasonal patterns of several types of tool use exhibited by a chimpanzee ( Pan troglodytes ) population residing in central Africa, to determine whether their technical skills provided access to fallback resources when preferred food items were scarce. Chimpanzees in the Goualougo Triangle exhibit a diverse repertoire of tool behaviours, many of which are exhibited throughout the year. Further, they have developed specific tool sets to overcome the issues of accessibility to particular food items. Our conclusion is that these chimpanzees use a sophisticated tool technology to cope with seasonal changes in relative food abundance and gain access to high-quality foods. Subgroup sizes were smaller in tool using contexts than other foraging contexts, suggesting that the size of the social group may not be as important in promoting complex tool traditions as the frequency and type of social interactions. Further, reports from other populations and species showed that tool use may occur more often in response to ecological opportunities and relative profitability of foraging techniques than scarcity of resources.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological and social correlates of chimpanzee tool use

Sanz

Morgan

2013

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

105

146

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“…However, these pioneering efforts provided essential platforms for more refined approaches, some incorporating both genetic and environmental variables into analyses (27). Other advances yielded confirmatory evidence for culture through (i) more focused microhabitat analyses for specific behaviors such as ant-dipping (28,29); (ii) comparisons between neighboring communities sharing genes and habitat properties (30); and (iii) social learning experiments, as for nut-cracking (31,32).…”

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confidence: 99%

Culture extends the scope of evolutionary biology in the great apes

Whiten

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Discoveries about the cultures and cultural capacities of the great apes have played a leading role in the recognition emerging in recent decades that cultural inheritance can be a significant factor in the lives not only of humans but also of nonhuman animals. This prominence derives in part from these primates being those with whom we share the most recent common ancestry, thus offering clues to the origins of our own thoroughgoing reliance on cumulative cultural achievements. In addition, the intense research focus on these species has spawned an unprecedented diversity of complementary methodological approaches, the results of which suggest that cultural phenomena pervade the lives of these apes, with potentially major implications for their broader evolutionary biology. Here I review what this extremely broad array of observational and experimental methodologies has taught us about the cultural lives of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans and consider the ways in which this knowledge extends our wider understanding of primate biology and the processes of adaptation and evolution that shape it. I address these issues first by evaluating the extent to which the results of cultural inheritance echo a suite of core principles that underlie organic Darwinian evolution but also extend them in new ways and then by assessing the principal causal interactions between the primary, genetically based organic processes of evolution and the secondary system of cultural inheritance that is based on social learning from others.social learning | culture | evolutionary biology | chimpanzee | orangutan R ecent decades have revealed social learning (learning from others) to be pervasive across the animal kingdom, with important implications for evolutionary biology at large (1) and the subject of the Sackler Colloquium published here (2). This article focuses on great apes: chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), and orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus). Other primates are dealt with elsewhere in the issue (3, 4). Despite an early report (5), we still know little about cultural phenomena in chimpanzees' rarer sister species, the bonobo (Pan paniscus) so bonobos are omitted here. I also make only limited reference to human culture, although we are technically also great apes. Human culture is extensively treated in other papers in this issue.

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“…However, other authorities in the field have argued that the habitats of wild chimpanzees are too complex to rule out ecological explanations a priori or without specific empirical data (Galef, 1992;Tomasello, 1999). An intermediate position is that group-specific behavioral differences will always be a product of interactions among ecological, genetic, and social factors (Krüt-zen, van Schaik, & Whiten, 2007;Laland & Janik, 2006, a stance also adopted by recent field studies (Möbius, Boesch, Koops, Matsuzawa, & Humle, 2008;Schöning, Humle, Möbius, & McGrew, 2008).…”

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confidence: 99%

The influence of ecology on chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) cultural behavior: A case study of five Ugandan chimpanzee communities.

Gruber¹,

Potts²,

Krupenye³

et al. 2012

Journal of Comparative Psychology

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The influence of ecology on the development of behavioral traditions in animals is controversial, particularly for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), for which it is difficult to rule out environmental influences as a cause of widely observed community-specific behavioral differences. Here, we investigated 3 potential scenarios that could explain the natural variation in a key extractive tool behavior, "fluid-dip," among several communities of chimpanzees of the Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii subspecies in Uganda. We compared data from previous behavioral ecological studies, field experiments, and long-term records of chimpanzee tool-using behavior. We focused on the quality of the available food, dietary preferences, and tool sets of 5 different communities, and carried out a standardized field experiment to test systematically for the presence of fluid-dip in 4 of these communities. Our results revealed major differences in habitat, available diet, and tool use behavior between geographically close communities. However, these differences in ecology and feeding behavior failed to explain the differences in tool use across communities. We conclude that ecological variables may lead both to innovation and loss of behavioral traditions, while contributing little to their transmission within the community. Instead, as soon as a behavioral tradition is established, sociocognitive factors likely play a key maintenance role as long as the ecological conditions do not change sufficiently for the tradition to be abandoned.

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Cultural differences in army ant predation by West African chimpanzees? A comparative study of microecological variables

Cited by 77 publications

References 32 publications

Ecological and social correlates of chimpanzee tool use

Ecological and social correlates of chimpanzee tool use

Culture extends the scope of evolutionary biology in the great apes

The influence of ecology on chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) cultural behavior: A case study of five Ugandan chimpanzee communities.

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