Studying the rare ability may shed light on how the animals learn:
Do you peel bananas from the top or bottom? One elephant goes with a third option.
When handed a slightly browning banana, Pang Pha, an Asian elephant at Zoo Berlin, will use her trunk to break the fruit, shake the pulp onto the ground, discard the peel and then shove the pulp into her mouth, researchers report in the April 10 Current Biology. The rare behavior, previously recorded in just a few elephants, could help shed light on how the animals learn complex movements.
When a zookeeper first told neuroscientist Lena Kaufmann of Humboldt University of Berlin that one of the elephants peeled bananas, she decided to test it out for herself. For weeks, Kaufmann and colleagues couldn't get Pang Pha to replicate the behavior. That's because the way the elephant eats bananas seems to depend on ripeness.
Pang Pha ate green and yellow bananas whole — peel and all. It was only when Kaufmann offered the gentle giant a brown-spotted banana that she revealed her peeling prowess. But the fruit can't be too brown, Kaufmann's team found. Pang Pha rejected completely brown bananas. Initially she would place them gently on the ground in protest. Now she throws them aside.
[...] The new study shows the value of studying individual animals, Kaufmann says. "There's such a rich landscape of behaviors that we lose if we only look at what all elephants have in common," she says. "If you look at each individual elephant, you can see that they're able to do really amazing things."
Journal Reference:
L.V. Kaufmann et al. Elephant banana peeling. Current Biology. 33, April 10, 2023. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.076
(Score: 5, Interesting) by richtopia on Saturday April 29, @03:53PM (1 child)
Adjacent topic: is anyone else amazed by elephant's dexterity with their trunks? The closest analogue for human anatomy I can think of is the tongue (muscle connected at one end with no structural support). And try as hard as I can I can barely avoid biting my tongue or keeping it away from the dentist's tooling.
Yea, cephalopods have tentacles but they are so far removed evolutionary they are other-worldly. Elephants are big mammals with a crazy long nose!
(Score: 4, Informative) by Reziac on Sunday April 30, @02:31AM
That's nothing. Find a vid of mating elephants. You really don't expect to see dexterity with a penis.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29, @04:10PM (1 child)
Should be grateful to receive any bananas. If I were its
bossownermaster it would get ONLY brown bananas from now on - and not many of them - until it learns to appreciate that that's how it is around here.(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29, @06:15PM
The beatings will continue until morale improves!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by istartedi on Saturday April 29, @05:00PM
Mara [youtube.com] appears to be using the inside curl of her trunk to keep the sweet inside from getting covered with dust. Who wants that? Of course the other elephant has what looks like a clean concrete floor, so may feel no need to bother.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Saturday April 29, @05:55PM (1 child)
So yellow and green are fine, spotted are peeled and brown are rejected. Sounds somewhat human and familiar, except we tend to peel the yellow, let the green ripe, possibly peel and use the spotted once for cooking and as noted nobody likes a rotten banana. That said I don't think I have ever seen an animal peel a banana or skin a fruit in some other fashion before eating them, they tend to just bite and swallow.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Sunday April 30, @02:33AM
I knew someone who had a very strange horse. This horse would take a whole apple, crunch it up, then spit out just the core.
He also stole shirts if you left them hanging on the fence, and a couple times picked up and ran off with a kitten. (No harm done, other than a soggy and confused kitten.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.