Day 46: This chimp just rocks

Santino the stone-throwing chimp. Credit: Mathias Osvath

I’m definitely not breaking news here — ol’ Santino has been making the rounds in the past couple of days. But he deserves his fame. He’s revealed a way of thinking that’s never been so definitively attributed to non-human animals.

Santino, a chimp, lives at Sweden’s Furuvik Zoo. Back in 1997, zoo keepers noticed odd piles of rocks facing public viewing areas. Since then, Mathias Osvath, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, has been spying on Santino and his mischievous ways. 

Osvath is now reporting some of the first unambiguous evidence that an animal other than humans can make spontaneous plans for future events. His research appears in this week’s issue of the journal Current Biology. 

“The planning actions, which took place in a calm state, included stone caching and the manufacture of discs from concrete, objects later used as missiles against zoo visitors during agitated chimpanzee dominance displays,” Osvath explains in the study. “Such planning implies advanced consciousness and cognition traditionally not associated with nonhuman animals.”

Weapons of mass disruption: Santino the chimp is now famous, because he's been plotting for years to throw stones at visitors to his Swedish zoo. Credit: Mathias Osvath

The Furuvik zoo is open to visitors only 25 percent of the time, and so the animals aren’t as accustomed to visitation as animals might be in other facilities. During the off-season, Santino collected no rocks. But on the days visitors were coming, he would calmy pile up his ammunition. Around 1998, he began to batter the concrete in the center of his cage, breaking loose small chunks of that to add to his cache.

The calm stone collecting was in marked contrast to the agitation Santino would display when he was actually pegging the rocks at his visitors. 

Female chimps in the cage with Santino at various points of the study reportedly were not interested in his little hobby.

Osvath is proposing that animals “most probably have an ‘inner world’ like we have when reviewing past episodes of our lives or thinking of days to come. When wild chimps collect stones or go out to war, they probably plan this in advance. I would guess that they plan much of their everyday behavior.”

Osvath also pointed out that the environment in a zoo is far less complex than in a forest. “Zoo chimps never have to encounter the dangers in the forest or live through periods of scarce food,” he said. “Planning would prove its value in ‘real life’ much more than in a zoo.”

Sources: Current Biology and Eurekalert.