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Food Neophobia and Social Learning Opportunities in Great Apes

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Abstract

Finding food resources and maintaining a balanced diet are major concerns for all animals. A compromise between neophobia and neophilia is hypothesised to enable animals to enlarge their diet while limiting the risk of poisoning. However, little is known about how primates respond to novel food items and whether their use is socially transmitted. By comparing how four different species of great apes respond to novel food items, we investigated how differences in physiology (digestive tract size and microbial content), habitats (predictability of food availability), and social systems (group size and composition) affect their response toward novelty. We presented two familiar foods, one novel fruit, four novel aromatic plants from herbal medicine, and kaolin to captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla), Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii). We recorded smelling, approach-taste delays, ingestion, interindividual observations, and food transfers with continuous sampling. We found that behaviors differed between the apes: chimpanzees were the most cautious species and observed their conspecifics handling the items more frequently than the other apes. Close observations and food transfers were extremely rare in gorillas in comparison to orangutans and chimpanzees. We suggest that a low neophobia level reflects an adaptive response to digestive physiological features in gorillas and to unpredictable food availability in orangutans. Social interactions appeared to be predominant in chimpanzees and in both orangutan species to overcome food neophobia. They reflect higher social tolerance and more opportunities for social learning and cultural transmission in a feeding context.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Françoise and Rodolphe Delord for permission to conduct the experiments at Beauval zoological gardens and to use the accommodation of the site. We thank Patrick Caillé and Thierry Petit for giving us the permission to carry out the experiments at La Palmyre and for their help and advice. We are indebted to Sébastien Laurent for hosting the experiments at La Boissière du Doré and for his support throughout the study. We also express our gratitude to all the staff involved for their help during all the experiments, to Yohan Ajzenherc for helping with the video analyses, and to Florence Levrero for constructive discussions. Finally we also thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the manuscript.

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  1. Département des Jardins Botaniques et Zoologiques, Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, and Département Ecologie et Gestion de la Biodiversité, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, UMR 7204 CERSP, Paris, France

    Erik Gustafsson & Michel Saint Jalme

  2. Département Hommes, Natures, Sociétés, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, UMR 7206 Éco-anthropologie et Ethnobiologie, Paris, France

    Erik Gustafsson & Sabrina Krief

  3. Département des Jardins Botaniques et Zoologiques, Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France

    Marie-Claude Bomsel

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  1. Erik Gustafsson
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  2. Michel Saint Jalme
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  3. Marie-Claude Bomsel
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  4. Sabrina Krief
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Correspondence to Erik Gustafsson.

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Gustafsson, E., Saint Jalme, M., Bomsel, MC. et al. Food Neophobia and Social Learning Opportunities in Great Apes. Int J Primatol 35, 1037–1071 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-014-9796-y

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