Local leaf tearing techniques help chimps flirt in the forest 🐵

Monday 9 January 2023



Researchers from the University of St Andrews have found that chimpanzees in two neighbouring communities in the Budongo Forest, Uganda, use leaf gestures in different dialects to communicate with members of their group.

The study, published today (Wednesday 5 January) in Scientific Reports, shows that a community of chimpanzees will use their own preferred form of leaf-modifying gesture, and that neighbouring groups can use different ones, so that each group has its own gestural dialects.

Gestural communication is an integral part of chimpanzee social lives. Chimpanzees use gestures to ask for food, navigate social interactions, and make up after fights. Gestures come in many forms: some are performed only using the hands, some include touching another individual, and others involve the manipulation of common objects found in the chimpanzees’ environment, like sticks, trees, and leaves.

For example, leaf gestures can include modifying the leaves by tearing or ripping them with a distinctive sound or pulling them off the stem, just like plucking the petals off a daisy – ‘she loves me, she loves me not’. These leaf-modifying gestures look very similar to each other and have been seen in almost all the communities of chimpanzees studied from East to West Africa. But, for the first time, researchers have now shown that each group maintains its own style or dialect of leaf-modifying gestures, and that these differences cannot be explained by differences in their forest environment or genetics.

More:
https://news.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/local-leaf-tearing-techniques-help-chimps-flirt-in-the-forest/