In a first, chimpanzees seen smashing and eating tortoises | Hacker News Reader

In a first, chimpanzees seen smashing and eating tortoises

nationalgeographic.com

73 pointspseudolus37 comments

We have chimps and "chimps" using cell phone. https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/b08v5...

Turtle smashing mental level requirements are not much higher than social media surfing, but there are plenty of examples they can learn complex sequence of steps and pass it on.

"Turtle smashing mental level requirements are not much higher than social media surfing" -- what leads you to this conclusion? It is not clear to me that this is a trivial statement.

I'll second this anecdotally because I have no problem browsing hackernews all day but yesterday I fought desperately trying to crack a coconut for half an hour.

Smashing a turtle is far easier than cracking a coconut.

African or European turtle?

Not trying to be overly pedantic but, turtles and tortoises are two very different things

Tortoises are a species of turtle ("Testudinoidea")

The chimp using Instagram is amazing. Wow.

Well actually Instagram is using the chimp because it's selling the chimp's metadata to advertisers. ;)

Chimps have been shown to use tools and pass on the knowledge to their offspring.

https://phys.org/news/2016-10-wild-chimpanzee-mothers-young-...

they are apparently delicious https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jul/31/featuresreview...

This is cool, but percussive techniques are not limited to chimps. e.g. bearded capuchins use what is essentially a hammer and anvil to break nuts: https://www.livescience.com/27524-nut-cracking-monkeys-skill...

If I call correctly sone birds do this too, using stones to break nuts. Was probably some kind of corvid.

I've seen crows drop walnuts in front of oncoming cars so they'll get run over. Corvids are smart birds.

I'll take that and raise you "casual understanding of water displacement by a crow'

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04

Seagulls drop crabs and shellfish all the time.

They've never been documented eating any reptiles? Not even something trivial like lizards? That seems so odd, I don't know why but I assumed they ate just about everything.

As far as my brief reading has got me, despite what was my general understanding until now they generally eat very little meat at all [1]. I guess it makes sense in this case that they're never been found eating reptiles.

[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/how-to-eat-l...

The've been documented eating monkeys: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150728-chimps-nearly-wiped-...

I think that the lede is more that they're using problem solving to eat the turtles by breaking their shell.

That was my reaction as well. Small palm-sized lizards are so common I'm amazed no one has observed a chimp snatching and eating one.

Well, this is terrible news on World Turtle Day.

I'm fascinated that tortoises are in fact reptilian since I'd previously thought that reptiles were a strictly meat-eating class. Also that an ancient battle formation was named after them.

Marine iguanas, found on Galapagos, are another counter-example to reptiles being strictly meat-eating:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_iguana#Feeding

>The marine iguana forages almost exclusively on red and green algae in the inter- and subtidal zones.

Tortoises are mostly vegetarian although I've seen them eat garden snails. Turtles however are cold blooded predators that eat meat all the time

Cue Also Sprach Zarathustra

>You're in a desert and you're walking along in the sand and all of a sudden you look down and...

It's fascinating to see evolution unfold before our eyes that may replicate our own evolution circa 5-10 million years ago.

Why is this evolution? I imagine this is nothing new, we just hadn't seen it before.

Exactly. Mentioned briefly in the article (e.g., the habituation of chimpanzees to researchers), but the idea of non-human "culture" has been strange to/dismissed by researchers for some time, only because we did not have enough data to understand the diversity of their behavior. This is almost certainly an example of researchers simply getting new (and interesting!) data.

I'm a little flabbergasted that the idea of animals using tools is so groundbreaking. I've seen squirrels pick apples up off the ground, climb to the top of a tree, and drop the apple over and over again to break it into small convenient pieces. I've seen birds do the same thing too, with shellfish. You see all kinds of stuff when you have your eyes open.

Wait until chimps figure out how to refine oil and use combustion engines.

When you consider the effort to get to that stage of locomotion it's amazing that flying birds haven't advanced faster technologically.

I guess birds (and most animals) have a hit a local minimum that they'll never climb out of.

Humans got lucky with figuring out fire. Fire simplifies everything.

I don't think it's the tool use, its the specific tool use - they are observing a new behaviour. It's not that they assumed they couldn't (I mean, look up "Chimps using tools" on youtube), it's just a novel behaviour, which is neat to see. It's not something groundbreaking, it's just notable.

Wow, my brain can't process that. How do the squirrels climb if they're holding the apple at the same time?

True, they've probably been doing this for a million years. But they're our closest relatives, and we have living examples of primates that are at various points of eating vegetation/meat, using tools and not, etc...

Seeing a primate eating meat and using tools despite being built to eat vegetation suggests a link to our own past.

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