Great apes get a kick out of ‘playfully teasing’ each other, study finds | 24CA News
As It Happens6:24Great apes get a kick out of ‘playfully teasing’ one another, examine finds
What do you name it when a chimpanzee presents his buddy a scrumptious piece of fruit solely to drag his hand away on the final second?
Or when a bonobo repeatedly pokes, prods and pulls on the hair of an older relative not exhausting sufficient to harm, however simply sufficient to be annoying?
It’s not fairly play, argues anthropologist Erica Cartmill, nevertheless it’s not fairly aggression both. It’s “playful teasing.” And, in line with a brand new examine, it is a highly regarded exercise amongst juvenile nice apes.
“A lot of the behaviours that we saw, I think, will be very familiar to anyone who has parented a toddler,” Cartmill, a cognitive scientist at UCLA and Indiana University, advised As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
“And perhaps to those people who grew up with siblings.”
Their findings had been printed this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Scientists have documented 18 distinct ‘teasing behaviours’ in younger bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans at zoos in San Diego, Calif., and Leipzig, Germany. (Laumer et al., 2024 Proceedings of the Royal Society B)
In the examine, Cartmill and her colleagues outline playful teasing as one thing that is “mutually enjoyable, occurs in close relationships, requires the anticipation of another’s response and involves creating unexpected moments that deviate from expected interaction norms.”
“These are the kinds of behaviours where one individual, the teaser, will do something that’s mildly irritating,” Cartmill stated.
While reviewing 75 hours of footage from zoos in San Diego, Calif., and Leipzig, Germany, they documented 142 clear situations bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans teasing their compadres.
Most typically, it was younger apes doing the taunting, and grown-ups had been frequent targets. The examine says people additionally exhibit these behaviours in early childhood, noting that infants begin playfully teasing as younger as eight months outdated, typically earlier than they even begin saying phrases.
The scientists categorized 18 distinct “teasing behaviours,” together with providing a physique half or an object solely to withdraw, pulling on hair or physique elements, hitting with objects, stealing when there isn’t any motive to, tickling, swinging an object in somebody’s face, and — Cartmill’s private favorite — violating private area.
“Sometimes you end up with a juvenile ape with their face, like, right up in front of an adult who’s like, ‘I’m trying to ignore you. I’m trying to ignore you,'” she stated.
“That’s one of the things that really characterizes these behaviours…. They’re hard to ignore.”
Why do they do it?
None of those teasing ways are novel discoveries, Cartmill stated.
“The behaviours that we were looking at aren’t new behaviours, right? It’s not like we observed a turtle building a fire,” she stated.
“These are things that people have seen before, but they haven’t looked closely at as their own kind of behaviour. And I think that’s really what our study was about, was to take things that fell into that grey area in between fighting and play.”
By classifying these behaviours as teasing, and specializing in them, she says scientists can be higher capable of “answer questions about why it evolved, why might animals engage in it and even to figure out how widely spread these sorts of behaviours are across the animal kingdom.”
As for the aim of teasing amongst nice apes, she has a couple of theories.
Play is normally observe, she stated, in order that they could possibly be “practising skills that will help them master their social relationships.”
“It could be that you’re trying to test the strength of your social relationships, right? How far can I push this other individual?” she stated. “And that might tell you something about how likely they are to, say, back you up if you get into a fight.”
Or, she says, it could be about “showing off the strength of your relationships to other individuals.”
“A third possibility is that it’s not just about testing or showing off your social relationships. It might actually help to strengthen or to build those relationships in the first place,” she stated. “Some of these behaviours are the sorts of things you might see in flirting.”
Martin Surbeck, a Harvard University evolutionary biologist who was not concerned within the analysis, referred to as it “a nice comparative study in apes, showing the prevalence of a behaviour, which we know very well from our own experience and to which we can relate very much.”
Surbeck says he is observed related behaviours whereas observing bonobos within the wild, and that it typically offers him a smile throughout a strenuous day of area work.
“I believe that all the similarities we observe between us and ‘them,’ the mirror they are to ourselves, should be a call to action to invest more to prevent these species from getting extinct in their natural habitat,” he stated.
Cartmill, in the meantime, says the examine has modified how she thinks about her personal playful teasing behaviours. After all, human beings are nice apes, too.
“It does give me an evolutionary explanation,” she stated. “I can say, ‘No, no, no. I’m not being mean. It’s just what I was built to do.'”
