Armed chimpanzees driven wild by taste of honey
Not content with fishing for insects, the resourceful chimpanzees of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Goualougo Triangle have another trick to show off. New Chimpcam footage shows the clever apes bashing in beehives with clubs before gorging on the sweet honey inside.
Scientists leading the project say the clips provide further evidence of the group’s remarkable sophistication compared to other chimpanzee populations.
“It seems these chimps in central Africa have developed more sophisticated techniques for getting at the honey than populations in eastern and western Africa – maybe it is some kind of regional feature,” Crickette Sanz of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told the BBC.
While the honey has little nutritional value, it does seem to serve to satisfy the chimps’ sweet tooth, with some of the apes happy to put in long hours, bashing away at beehives hundreds of times to get at the sticky stuff, often while hanging precariously upside down in trees.
“Their excitement when they’ve succeeded is incredible, you can see how much they are enjoying tasting the honey,” said Sanz.
David Morgan of the Wildlife Conservation Society and Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, who co-authored the study on the chimps’ honey habit, said one of the most exciting aspects of the research had been the realisation that the apes had developed ready-made “tool kits” to help them get to the honey.
“They have a tool kit ready when they go for honey,” Morgan told the BBC.
“They will have large pounding clubs and they’ll use those to hammer the hives. And if that doesn’t do, if the holes are too small, then they’ll access them using smaller, thinner dipping wands. And they are also using smaller sticks for leverage to get better access to the hive.”