Richard Collins: Scientists study orangutans' balance between curiosity and caution
Orangutans are shy creatures but there is a location in Sumatra where they have become habituated to people, allowing their behaviour to be observed. Caroline Shuppli and her team have been studying their inquisitiveness here. Picture: Anup Shah/WWF/PA Wie
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds — Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita
The human urge to 'meddle' has helped make us what we are. But unlocking Nature’s secrets is dangerous: Icarus flew too close to the sun; our world now has stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The great explorers set out into the unknown. The gamble paid off for some, but others disappeared without trace. Few wild creatures embrace novelty. They keep their heads down — and with good reason... curiosity killed the cat.
Our great ape cousins are not adventurous. Chimps, our closest relatives, are inquisitive in captivity but not, it seems, in the wild. That raises an intriguing question: how did the urge to investigate their world arise among our human ancestors? Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour are seeking an answer.
The orangutan, ‘the old man of the woods’, is a shy creature. It is difficult even to spot, let alone study, in the wild. Trekking in the Bornean rain forest, I had to be shown one by research scientists I met. But there is a location in Sumatra where the hairy giants have become habituated to people, allowing their behaviour to be observed.
After many many years in the making, our study on wild orangutans' curiosity is out!
— caroline (@carolschuppli) August 23, 2023
We presented the Sumatran orangutans with a naturalistic but novel object. Orangutans were reluctant to directly interact with the object, confirming previous results🦧https://t.co/j3qznD6MQP
Caroline Schuppli, lead author of a paper just published, has been studying the orangutans there. Her team placed coloured plastic objects at strategic locations, to see if the orangutans would investigate them. They didn’t. Indeed, the hairy apes went out of their way to avoid them.
But Schuppli was not convinced that they lacked curiosity. The objects presented, she surmised, might be so strange that they spooked the animals. If a flying saucer landed and in your back garden, would you rush to greet the crew? Gaudy objects might be the orang equivalent of an alien spacecraft. Would the apes respond to something less strange?
The researchers prepared a log with a hole containing locally-produced honey and hung it in the trees. The object would be novel to orangutans but not so radically different from something they might actually encounter.
The orangutans approached the object, but were extremely cautious doing so. An individual would normally insert a finger into a tree-hole to extract honey but, when dealing with the test object, they used a twig to do so.
Young animals were not as cautious as older ones. They spent less time observing the log before approaching it. A tendency to ‘try it on the dog first’ was evident; an orangutan would approach the log more quickly if another did so ahead of it. At locations where there was already abundant food, there was much less interest in the strange object.
"We often think learning and innovation are solo acts, but this may not be the case in our early history," said Schuppli in a news release. "If novelty was the spark, then our social lives may have provided the accelerant."
So it seems that an investigative ‘spark’ may have been present in the common ancestor of orangutans and humans.
‘Mighty oaks from little acorns grow’.
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