Searching for bountiful fruit crops in the rain forest, chimpanzees remember past feeding experiences
Where do you go when the fruits in your favourite food tree
are gone and you don’t know which other tree has produced new fruit yet? An
international team of researchers, led by Karline Janmaat from the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, studied whether
chimpanzees aim their travel to particular rainforest trees to check for fruit
and how they increase their chances of discovering bountiful fruit crops. The
scientists found that chimpanzees use long-term memory to remember the size and
location of fruit trees and feeding experiences from previous seasons using a
memory window which can be two months to three years ago.