Female chimpanzee weight crack#

Chimpanzees can encode the requirements that a nut-cracking tool should meet (in terms of weight) to be effective.Ĭitation: Schrauf C, Call J, Fuwa K, Hirata S (2012) Do Chimpanzees Use Weight to Select Hammer Tools? PLoS ONE 7(7):Įditor: Laurie Santos, Yale University, United States of America

Female chimpanzee weight crack#

Our results show that chimpanzees use weight alone in selecting tools to crack open nuts and that experience clearly affects the subjects’ attentiveness to the tool properties that are relevant for the task at hand. By presenting chimpanzees with three hammers that differed solely in weight, we assessed their ability to relate the weight of the different tools with their effectiveness and thus select the most effective one(s). This study experimentally investigated whether chimpanzees are able to encode the relevance of weight as a property of hammers to crack open nuts. Several properties make a hammer suitable for nut cracking, with weight being a key factor in determining the impact of a strike in general, the greater the weight the fewer strikes required. Nut cracking is one of the most complex forms of tool use, the choice of an adequate hammer being a critical aspect in success. The extent to which tool-using animals take into account relevant task parameters is poorly understood.