He and his team at the University of Zurich have spent several years confirming that observation in dozens of individuals. They’ve shown that wild orangutans are decidedly incurious. They eschew the new. They abhor the unfamiliar. Captive orangutans couldn’t be more different. They readily explore what their wild counterparts ignore. Something about captivity, whether it’s the close contact with humans or the absence of predators, unlocks a latent capacity for curiosity. And if that happens early enough, it boosts their problem-solving abilities as adults. “This dormant potential lies there waiting to be used,” van Schaik says.
To test orangutans, one of van Schaik’s team members, Sofia Forss, built fake orangutan nests in the Sumatran canopy. She then filled them with items that the apes would never have seen before—a Swiss flag, plastic fruit, and even an orangutan doll. Footage from motion-sensitive cameras revealed that wild orangutans walked around the items for months. Only two adolescents ever actually touched the unfamiliar items. When another team member, Caroline Schuppli, repeated the same experiment in several zoos, she got completely different results. Within minutes, the orangutans had wrecked the nests. [...]
Why? In captivity, orangutans experience a safe and stable environment, without the constant distractions of hunger and predators. That gives them the time and opportunity to explore, and such explorations, far from leading to a sticky end, are actively rewarded with food and other treats. They also encounter humans, who become trusted role models in the way that the orangutans’ parents do in the wild. And humans ... we like to touch stuff. “Everything we touch becomes ... we call it ‘blessed,’” says van Schaik. “It’s labeled as explorable.” [...]
“I myself am very curious about how urbanization may be influencing the expression of curiosity in animals that are living in cities,” says Sarah Benson-Amram from the University of Wyoming. Urban animals are certainly free-living, but they often experience many of the same conditions—plentiful food, fewer predators, and abundant human role models—that captive orangutans do. Do they become curiouser and curiouser for it?
No comments:
Post a Comment