Japanese macaques in the forest. Credit: S. Turner

On chimp culture and fads:

There was a stone-handling behavior in Japanese macaques that the Japanese researchers were actually able to witness the first few events and then watch it spread throughout the community. There are classic examples from the late 1960's of Japanese macaques again, where one individual — a young female — created new behaviors, and they were able to watch those spread through the community. One example was that she took her sweet potatoes down by the ocean to wash them. She was the first individual to do this and three, four years later, every individual in the community except for the adult males were doing it.

And then, the same individual a couple years later took wheat which had been scattered on the sand for these macaques, just grains of wheat — and you can imagine picking grains of wheat out of sand, which is torturous. So what she did was scoop up big handfuls of wheat and sand, take them down to the tide pools and drop it all in! The wheat would float, of course, so she would skim the wheat off the top. In both cases, the behavior spread in a typical fashion. It went first to her maternal family and her playmates — to the individuals she was with most of the time and her mom, basically. Then it would spread throughout the community through the other adult females watching. Those kinds of things have been seen, but it's very very rare, probably only four or five times in fifty years.

Most of the fads that we see seem to be relatively meaningless. The foraging behaviors are clearly important because they're allowing them to access food sources that they wouldn't otherwise be able to. But as far as other cultural behaviors, some just seem really pointless — they're just customary, similar to the way we shake hands when we meet, while Asian people bow. There's a thing called a grooming handclasp — if you picture you and me facing each other, we grab each other's right hand and raise it above our heads in a little triangle and we groom each other's opposite right armpit. So picture that. There are several communities of chimps that do that and they hold each other's hand above their heads. Now in Gombe, they never ever, ever do that — they find a branch and they both hold onto the same branch. They're in the exact same position except that they use a branch for support instead of clasp hands.

We've never seen that handclasp at Gombe in forty years. And that seems totally arbitrary. They can be holding onto the tiniest little twig and we're watching like 'Come on, just grab each other's arm!' It's just how things are done in that community.

Advice for a young scientist hoping to pursue primatology:

Elizabeth Lonsdorf recording chimp behavior at a termite mound. Credit: Joshua Leonard

Start by getting some kind of experience — any kind of experience. Volunteer at your local zoo or science museum or if you're in college, volunteer on a professor's research project. You really have to start out working for free for a long time before people will pay you. But there's a payoff to that. I think what was clear when I was applying to graduate schools and applying to work on this research is that I had worked for a really long time on a lot of different types of research projects just to gain experience, not because I was getting paid. That really stood out. People could see that I would stick with this and I had experience with the scientific process and with watching animals. At our new ape center here at the zoo, we have six or eight undergraduate volunteers who are taking behavioral observations and doing data collection for us all the time. They're local college students. It's a great experience for them — they learn about the science of animal behavior and they learn how to distinguish individuals and those are things that are really basic. But it's something that when you're going for a job or for graduate school, they're going to have to teach you if you don't already know how to do it.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
3 pages: | 1 | 2 | 3 |