journal PNAS<\/a>, reveal that mothers look for opportunities for their young to play with similarly-aged playmates \u2013 travelling further away from their \u2018core\u2019 area and towards another mother\u2019s core area to do so.<\/p>\nMaria van Noordwijk and her team from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB) have followed habituated mother-infant pairs in Borneo since 2003. Encounters between mothers are rare. \u201cAdults usually don\u2019t get very close to each other,\u201d explains van Noordwijk, who led the fieldwork while at the University of Zurich.<\/p>\n
But infants don\u2019t seem to show the same level of caution. \u201cThey zoom towards each other, roughhousing, biting, grappling,\u201d she says. \u201cOrangutan kids have a \u2018play button\u2019 that only mum can switch off when she decides it\u2019s time to move on.\u201d<\/p>\n
The researchers noticed that these sessions came at a cost to the mothers. \u201cIt just looked like a really long, hard day for them,\u201d says van Noordwijk. \u201cI knew there was something going on with these playdays, but we needed the right statistical technique to verify this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over 15 years, van Noordwijk\u2019s team had collated 32,000 hours of observations from 31 mother-infant pairs. Odd Jacobson, a researcher at MPIA-AB, helped to test whether mothers were actively seeking playmates for their young using statistical analysis \u2013 and came back with surprising results.<\/p>\n
\u201cMothers appear to match their kids with play partners that are physically and developmentally suitable,\u201d says Jacobson. And that wasn\u2019t all \u2013 mothers travelled throughout the forest to forge these meetings.<\/p>\n
Social play between two-year old female Moby and three-year-old-female Jane. Credit: Tuanan Orangutan Research Project\/UZH<\/p>\n
\u201cTo find a suitable playmate, it seems that the mothers position themselves spatially to increase the likelihood of encountering mothers with similarly-aged offspring,\u201d continues Jacobson. This movement might suggest that orangutan mothers are aware of what van Noordwijk calls the \u2018forest gossip\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cOrangutans might spend most of their day alone but they\u2019re still embedded in a social network,\u201d she explains. \u201cThey know exactly who their mostly lifelong neighbours are, and they know who had a baby when. From their treetop positions they can probably get a rough sense of where these neighbours are, at least on occasion.\u201d<\/p>\n
Navigating this social landscape may draw upon the complex cognitive skills that orangutans possess. \u201cWe have accepted for a long time that they apply spatial navigation and route planning to locate and access food resources,\u201d says van Noordwijk. \u201cNow we show that they are combining a cognitive map of not only feeding, but also social resources, in order to provide for their young.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, the researchers acknowledge that the playdates were rare, occurring roughly once every 20 days a mother-infant pair was followed. And they\u2019re currently unsure whether the orangutan mothers\u2019 effort is rewarded.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe still don\u2019t know if the time and energy mothers spend arranging playdates give their young an advantage later in life,\u201d says Sri Suci Utami Atmoko, one of the study\u2019s co-authors, from Universitas Nasional in Indonesia. \u201cWhat is certain is that only long-term studies like these can possibly unlock the answer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Read the full findings here<\/a>. <\/p>\nTop image: a four-year-old infant is carried by its mother during travel. Credit: Tuanan Orangutan Research Project\/UZH<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Orangutans are one of the most solitary species of great apes \u2013 but a long-term study has discovered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":636210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":["post-636209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}