Chimpanzees use long-term spatial memory to monitor large fruit trees and remember feeding experiences across seasons
Section snippets
Study Subjects and Data Collection
We followed five adult chimpanzee females during fruit-scarce periods, from 16 April 2009 to 30 August 2011, for successive continuous periods ranging from 4 to 8 weeks (total full days = 275). Their territory (South Group; 26.5 km2) was located in the largest remaining tract (5363 km2) of primary lowland rainforest in West Africa: Taï National Park, Côte d'Ivoire (Boesch et al., 2008, Kouakou et al., 2011, N'Goran et al., 2012). A target female was followed from the point of waking until
Did Chimpanzees Use Sensory Cues?
To investigate whether both feeding and closely inspected trees were larger than control trees, we tested the effect of the type of tree (as a within-subject factor) on trunk size. Overall, we found a significant difference between the trunk sizes of trees that were of the same species but different types (control trees, feeding trees and closely inspected trees that had an empty crown; RM-ANOVA: F2,38 = 64.31, P < 0.001; Fig. 3). The trunk sizes of trees in which chimpanzees fed were larger than
Discussion
By analysing the monitoring behaviour of five chimpanzee females, followed on foot for continuous periods of up to 8 weeks, we investigated chimpanzees' abilities to discriminate between small and large rainforest trees and the underlying cognition used to discover large fruit crops. We found that the focal animals preferentially fed on larger trees, compared to alternative conspecific trees of reproductive size encountered on control transects. The difference in trunk size between trees used
Acknowledgments
Financial support for this research was provided by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. In Côte d'Ivoire, we thank the Ministère de la Recherches Scientifiques, the Ministère de l'Environnement et des Eaux et Forêts, the Office Ivoirien des Parcs et Réserves, the directorship of the Taï National Park, the Centre Suisse de Recherche Scientifique, L. Wittiger, D. Dowd, A. Diarrassouba, I. Kone and S. Kone for logistic support and permission to conduct our studies. We are
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