Orangutans like to sound cool
Anew study has found that orangutans use slang to sound cool, just like humans. (Slang is very informal words and phrases used by a group of people). Scientists from the University of Warwick, in England, studied 70 orangutans on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra in Southeast Asia. From 2005 to 2010, the experts spent more than 6,000 hours observing the orangutans and recording their “kiss-squeak” alarm calls.
Some of these orangutans were part of big social groups; others lived in smaller groups. In the big groups, new calls were used and then quickly dropped, a bit like the way slang phrases come in and out of fashion among teenagers. Orangutans from smaller groups were less likely to come up with new calls but if they did, they were more likely to keep on using them.
“Orangutans living in low densities have a rich ‘slang’ – a collection of calls that they recurrently use and gradually build upon,” said Dr Adriano Lameira, who was in charge of the study. He explained that in large groups of orangutans there is a lot of noisy communication going on, so some animals try to stand out from the crowd by doing something different. “Individuals want to show off their coolness and how much of a rebel they are,” he said.
This shows that orangutan language is more easily changed than researchers had realised. Lameira says that for a long time scientists believed that great apes used the same calls all their lives. However, the new study shows that the way orangutans communicate is shaped by each other – just like it is in humans. This gives us a better understanding of how our own language developed and shows why it’s so important to protect orangutans. “Many more clues await us in the lives of our closest living relatives,” says Dr Lameira, “as long as we manage to guarantee their protection in the wild.”