Noah AtkinWonderful new paper on unflanged male learning behaviour published today! 🧵
doi: 10.3389/fevo.2023.1158887
#Primatology #orangutans #SocialLearning #EvolutionaryAnthropology
Female orangutans are philopatric, but males after adolescence disperse - we still don’t know how far or how long they range for!
Juvenile orangutans show sex specific attention biases - females spend more time peering at their mother than anyone else, but males peer at behaviour from everyone - likely to build up a wider behavioural repertoire for their travels
What this paper shows is when unflanged males reach new areas, they spend a lot of time peering at the resident females i.e. the individuals that have lived in that area their whole lives
In turn, these unflanged males may act as cultural vectors - spreading behaviours from one area to another!
Really worth a read, as this paper sheds more light onto the still relatively unknown behaviour of unflanged males before and after ranging 🦧