10 Apr. (EUROPE PRESS) –
Elephants like to eat bananas, but don’t usually peel them first, until the case of an Asian female named Pang Pha. who taught herself this skill at the Berlin Zoo.
He first breaks open the banana before shaking it and scooping up the pulp, leaving the thick peel behind.
According to the authors of an investigation into the case, published in Current Biologyit is very likely that the elephant learned this unusual behavior by watching her keepers peel the bananas for her. The findings in a single elephant demonstrate that, in general, elephants have special cognitive and manipulative abilities.
“We have discovered a very unique behaviorr,” says Michael Brecht of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience at the Humboldt University of Berlin. What makes Pang Pha’s banana peeling so unique is a combination of factors—skill, speed, individuality, and putatively human origin—rather than a single behavioral element.”
Like other elephants, Pha eats whole green or yellow bananas. Flatly reject brown bananas. But when it comes to brown-spotted yellow bananas he eats them after peeling them.
Brecht and his colleagues, including Lena Kaufmann, also from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Andreas Ochs, from the Berlin Zoological Garden, made the discovery after learning from Pha’s keepers of his unusual talent for peeling bananas. At first, they were confused. They brought him yellow and green bananas and he never peeled them.
“It was only when we realized that he was only peeling yellow and brown bananas that our project took off,” Brecht recalls. When yellow bananas are offered to a group of elephants, Pha changes her behavior. He eats all the bananas he can whole and saves the last one to peel later.
Peeling bananas is known to be rare among elephants, and none of the other elephants in Berlin do it. It is not clear why Pha peels them. However, the researchers note that she was hand-reared by human keepers at the Berlin Zoo. She was never taught to peel bananas, but they did feed him peeled bananas.
Therefore, the researchers suggest that it learned to peel them by observing humans. Previous reports on African elephants suggest that elephants can interpret human gestures and classify people into ethnic groups, but complex human-derived manipulative behaviors, such as peeling bananas, seem quite unique, according to the researchers.
However, Pha’s findings suggest that, overall, elephants have amazing cognitive abilities and impressive manipulative ability. “Elephants have truly remarkable trunk dexterity and their behavior is determined by experience.says Brecht.
Researchers find it surprising that only Pha has learned to peel bananas. This leads them to wonder if such habits are normally passed down among elephant families. They are now studying other sophisticated trunk behaviors, such as tool use.
