This fussy elephant peels her bananas, but only when they’re perfectly ripe | 24CA News
As It Happens6:16This fussy elephant peels her bananas, however solely after they’re completely ripe
Pang Pha may be very explicit about her bananas.
Like most of us, the Asian elephant on the Berlin Zoo prefers her bananas to be the proper degree of brilliant yellow ripeness. And she additionally likes them peeled.
In reality, she peels them herself, utilizing her trunk.
“It’s a rare, very specific behaviour,” Lena Kaufmann, a biology PhD candidate at Humboldt University in Berlin, informed As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “In the zoo in Berlin, no other elephants do it.”
Kaufmann is the primary writer on a paper about Pang Pha’s banana-peeling prowess and preferences, which was printed this week within the journal Current Biology.
WATCH | Pang Pha peels some bananas, rejects others
Scientists examine Pang Pha, an elephant who peels bananas. The behaviour is uncommon, and never shared by her fellow elephants on the Berlin Zoo. (Current Biology)
Kaufmann was learning different points of elephant behaviour when the zookeepers informed her about Pang Pha’s fruit dealing with methods.
Curious, she began bringing bananas to the elephant to see if she would peel them.
“I would give them to her, and she would just eat it whole,” she stated. “And I started doubting it, to be honest. Like, I wasn’t sure about what the elephant keepers were talking about.”
But about two weeks in, she realized Pang Pha wasn’t the issue; the bananas have been. They weren’t but ripe. And arduous, inexperienced bananas are tougher to peel.
“At some point I did bring a riper banana, and then I saw this peeling,” Kaufmann stated.
Brown bananas? No thanks
Kaufmann determined to check the behaviour additional. Pang Pha’s pace and method, she stated, are fairly spectacular from a motor expertise perspective.
First, she breaks the banana along with her trunk, after which swings it round earlier than slamming it on the bottom.
“My friend used this reference to Harry Potter, actually, that I found quite funny. She will ‘swish and flick’ the banana when she’s shaking it to the ground,” Kaufmann stated. “And then … very like delicately, with the finger on her trunk tip, she will pick the peel and shake out the pulp.”
On common, it takes 22 seconds — sooner, Kaufmann says, than a human.
While Pang Pha will peel a yellow banana and gobble a inexperienced complete, she’s received little interest in something overly ripe. Hand her a black or brown banana, “and she just politely drops it to the floor,” Kaufmann stated.
And it is best to not push the problem.
“At some point, I gave her two in a row and the first one she just dropped. And the second one she really actually threw after me,” Kaufmann stated. “She has very specific tastes in bananas.”
She’ll additionally skip peeling yellow bananas when she’s being fed in a gaggle.
“She adapts her behaviour,” Kaufmann stated. “She takes into account the fact that there’s others that might steal away the bananas and that she might get less bananas if she peels each one.
She will just eat as many bananas as possible, and then keep the last one and peel that one to perform her favourite behaviour.”
An actual self-starter
Pang Pha shouldn’t be the world’s solely banana-peeling elephant. A fast YouTube search will present others performing the trick — although Kauffman says their methods differ, and it is attainable they have been skilled.
Meanwhile, no one skilled Pang Pha to peel a banana, although it is attainable she picked up the desire from her former caretaker.
“She came there when she was only half a year old, and she was the favourite of the main keeper back then. So she was bottle raised, and he was the one who peeled bananas for her as well,” Kauffman stated.
“We cannot tell for sure that she’s imitating human peeling. But … the way I would phrase it is that she definitely developed a liking for peeled bananas because of humans.”
Ecologist Chase LaDue — who research elephant behaviour, however was not concerned on this analysis — says Pang Pha’s peeling is spectacular, although not completely shocking.
“I have witnessed elephants manipulate their food in ways that seem to indicate individual preferences, including peeling bananas,” LaDue, a postdoctoral fellow in animal behaviour at Oklahoma City Zoo and Botanical Garden, stated in an e mail.
“However, the authors of this study have provided us with better context of how these kinds of behaviours may be manifested.”
The examine, he says, is restricted for less than observing one elephant’s behaviour, making it arduous to attract any bigger conclusions from the findings.
That stated, he welcomes any work that sheds gentle on “the complexity and flexibility of elephant behaviour.”
“Asian elephants like Pha are endangered across their range, threatened by habitat loss and increasing levels of conflict with humans,” LaDue stated.
“While conservation managers and government officials may not be concerned about whether an elephant will peel a banana, any conservation strategies that we implement to help elephants need to take into account their ability to adjust their behaviour in changing landscapes in novel and sometimes unpredictable ways.”
