Clever Puzzle-Solving Orangutans.

Posted by Alex in Animal, Science & Tech on July 5, 2007 at 2:01 am


Orangutans are really smart – either that or they’ve read Aesop’s Fable.

Faced with a vertical transparent tube, a quarter filled with water, in which a peanut floats tantalizingly beyond reach, what should you do? Five orang-utans from Leipzig Zoo in Germany all came to the same conclusion. Taking mouthfuls of water from a nearby bottle, they spat into the tube until the peanut floated into reach.

The apes’ ingenuity amazed the study’s leader, Natacha Mendes from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. "Before we started we thought this was really complicated," she says. "If you asked someone in an office to solve this problem many people wouldn’t be able to give a quick answer, and some probably wouldn’t be able to figure it out at all."

Mmmm… peanuts… Link


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3 comments to "Clever Puzzle-Solving Orangutans."

  1. Sylvain Romiguier
    July 5th, 2007 at 4:19 am

    This makes me remember a puzzle game which demonstrates that children passed the test better than their parents.

    In fact, the explanation was that children don't have a lot of knowledge about physics, etc... So they're looking for a direct answer, the simpliest one.

    but for most problems, we need a lot of knowledge and abilities to abstract the details and that is very difficult for children.

    Maybe it's the same process here with animals ... a direct solution, so the test choice is very important and do not demonstrate great abilities.

    Maybe if we live in a forest with hollow trees and a lot of water due to rains we would find this solution very quickly, it's just a matter of environment.

  2. Anstrom
    July 5th, 2007 at 6:28 am

    don't miss the video

    http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070702/multimedia/070702-7.mov

  3. Don
    July 5th, 2007 at 11:57 am

    Maybe they just like spitting in tubes.


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