Chimpanzees use botanical skills to discover fruit
Fruit-eating animals are known to use their spatial memory
to relocate fruit, yet, it is unclear how they manage to find fruit in the
first place. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have now investigated which strategies
chimpanzees in the Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa, use in
order to find fruit in the rain forest. The result: Chimpanzees know that trees
of certain species produce fruit simultaneously and use this botanical
knowledge during their daily search for fruit.