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Wednesday, Mar 11, 2009
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Stone-throwing ape with human traits

Ian Sample

Assembling ammunition in advance reveals chimp’s unsuspected ability to plan for future

The loutish behaviour of a stone-throwing chimpanzee at a zoo near the Arctic Circle has challenged scientists’ beliefs about human beings.

Santino, a 31-year-old male at the Furuvik zoo in Sweden, may be the first animal to exhibit an unambiguous ability to plan for the future, a behaviour many scientists argue is unique to humans. Forward planning takes considerable cognitive skills, because it requires an animal to envisage future events it will have to deal with.

Santino would get agitated when the first groups of visitors arrived at his enclosure in the morning, and would start hurling stones at the spectators. When the zookeepers investigated, they found that, while the zoo was closed, Santino had been busy making piles of ammunition, and returned to them to resupply.

How to catch?

To catch the chimp in action, one zookeeper hid in a room overlooking the enclosure and observed the ape’s behaviour before the zoo gates opened each morning. She saw Santino dragging stones from a protective moat that surrounded its island home, before placing them in piles. Further covert surveillance of the ape revealed that it spent some time tapping areas of concrete floor with his fist. Occasionally, the animal would thump harder, releasing chunks of concrete that it broke into rough discs.

A survey of the enclosure showed that Santino made piles of ammunition only on the quarter of the island’s shore that faced the visiting crowds.

Piling of stones

Since becoming aware of the issue, zookeepers have removed hundreds of caches of stones from the island and have observed Santino gathering stones and putting them in piles at least 50 times. Santino’s attempts to fashion concrete discs has been recorded 18 times, according to a report in Current Biology.

Cognitive scientist Mathias Osvath, the author of the study, believes that such complex forward planning suggests Santino can anticipate future events and is able to devise ways of dealing with them. “Forward planning like this is supposed to be uniquely human,” he said.

“Many apes throw objects, but the novelty with Santino is that he makes caches of these missiles while he is fully calm and only throws them much later on.”

Santino only gathered rocks and made concrete missiles when the zoo was closed. He gave up the behaviour completely when the zoo was shut over the winter.

The zookeepers recently decided that a surgical intervention was the best way to control Santino’s behaviour. “They have castrated the poor guy,” said Mr. Osvath. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2009

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