First observation of Dorylus ant feeding in Budongo chimpanzees supports absence of stick-tool culture
Abstract
The use of stick- or probe-tools is a chimpanzee universal, recorded in all long-term study populations across Africa, except one: Budongo, Uganda. Here, after 25-years of observation, stick-tool use remains absent under both natural circumstances and strong experimental scaffolding. Instead, the chimpanzees employ a rich repertoire of leaf-tools for a variety of dietary and hygiene tasks. One use of stick-tools in other communities is in feeding on the aggressive Dorylus ‘army-ant’ species, consumed by chimpanzees at all long-term study sites outside of mid-Western Uganda. Here we report the first observation of army-ant feeding in Budongo, in which individuals from the Waibira chimpanzee community employed detached leaves to feed on a ground swarm. We describe the behaviour and discuss whether or not it can be considered tool-use, together with its implication for the absence of stick-tool ‘culture’ in Budongo chimpanzees.
Citation
Mugisha , S , Zuberbuehler , K & Hobaiter , C 2016 , ' First observation of Dorylus ant feeding in Budongo chimpanzees supports absence of stick-tool culture ' , Primates , vol. 57 , no. 3 , pp. 389-394 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-016-0533-3
Publication
Primates
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0032-8332Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no 283871.Collections
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