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Necessity creates opportunities for chimpanzee tool use

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Date
07/2019
Author
Grund, Charlotte
Neumann, Christof
Zuberbuehler, Klaus
Gruber, Thibaud
Keywords
Foraging innovation
Necessity
Opportunity
Chimpanzees
Energy balance
Wild chimpanzees
Group-size
Grouping pattern
BF Psychology
DAS
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Abstract
Although social transmission mechanisms of animal cultures are well studied, little is known about the origins of behavioral innovations, even in established tool users such as chimpanzees. Previous work has suggested that wild chimpanzees are especially prone to engaging with tools during extended periods of low food availability and after long travel, supporting the hypothesis that cultural innovation is facilitated by necessity revealing opportunities. Here, we tested this hypothesis with a field experiment that directly compared subjects' immediate variation in measures of current energy balance with their interest in a novel foraging problem, liquid honey enclosed in an apparatus accessible by tool use. We found that the previous distance traveled directly predicted subjects' manipulations of both the apparatus and the tool, whereas previous feeding time was negatively correlated to manipulation time. We conclude that "necessity" augments chimpanzees' likelihood of engaging with ecological "opportunities," suggesting that both factors are scaffolding foraging innovation in this and potentially other species.
Citation
Grund , C , Neumann , C , Zuberbuehler , K & Gruber , T 2019 , ' Necessity creates opportunities for chimpanzee tool use ' , Behavioral Ecology , vol. 30 , no. 4 , pp. 1136-1144 . https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arz062
Publication
Behavioral Ecology
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arz062
ISSN
1045-2249
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arz062
Description
This work was funded by the European Research Council (FP7/2007–2013 / ERC grant number n° 283871) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant numbers 310030_143359 to K.Z.; CR13I1_162720, P300PA_164678 to T.G.).
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/19904

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