"Planning of the Apes" (or "Monkey News 5 - better than Police Academy 5")

Planning of the Apes
From Sciencemag

"Anybody who has been stuck without a bottle opener at a beach picnic knows the value of future planning. But is planning a uniquely human trait? Perhaps not. A new study shows that bonobos and orangutans can save tools that help them access a future snack."

"The findings suggest that cognitive precursors to human foresight may have evolved in great apes more than 14 million years ago."

"First, the animals spent five minutes in a room with two suitable and six unsuitable tools for a food apparatus that the apes could see but not touch. Then, the researchers led the animals to a neighboring room, letting them take along any tools they wished, and left them there for an hour while an attendant cleared out the remaining tools from the test room. When the apes returned to the test room, the apparatus was accessible, and the apes could get food from it as long as they had the right tool with them."

"Finally, to ensure that the animals were not making a simple association between tool and the reward, the researchers removed the apparatus from the test room before the animals returned for the second visit but still rewarded them if they came back with the right tool. The animals started bringing wrong tools more frequently under this condition..."

UPDATE: The monkey in a hammock is a Bonobo. (I'm allowed to call apes monkeys because monkey world does.) I know it looks a lot like a Chimp but Sciencemag insist it is a Bonobo. And I'm not going to argue.

Monkey world does not have Bonobo. (Bonobae? Bonobabas? Bonobos? ...Who knows...) But it does have Chimps. It does not have Gorillas either and this is a more tragic loss - but Gibbons, Orang Utans and others are all present. As, of course, is the Woolly Monkey.