[Animals] A bonobo was separated from her sister for 26 years, and she still remembers her

[FNX Magokiler]

A bonobo named Louise, born in captivity at the San Diego Zoo in the United States, lived with her sister, Loretta, and nephew, Erin, before being moved to the Japanese Kumamoto Sanctuary in 1992.

In the wild, female bonobos abandon their families when they mature and go to neighboring communities to form their own lineages. So it was quite natural that Louise would leave and she might never see the bonobos she grew up with again.

But in 2019, when researchers presented Louise with a photo of her sister, Loretta, next to an image of a bonobo she had never met, Louise stared at her relative's face, almost ignoring the stranger. And when she was shown a photo of her nephew next to that of a stranger, data collected by an infrared camera that harmlessly tracks eye movements showed that Louise had little or no interest in the stranger.

To be clear, Louise had not seen either member of her family for 26 years. And yet, over the course of eight tests, the 46-year-old bonobo showed a marked preference for looking at her long-lost relatives over other bonobos with whom she had never been housed.

After almost three decades, Louise seems to have remembered Loretta and Erin.

 

 

According to a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it is the longest lasting non-human social memory ever documented. The previous record belonged to bottlenose dolphins, which have been shown to recognize the vocalizations of their pod mates after 20 years.

Acute memory
The idea for this research arose after 15 years of working with po[CENSORED]tions of great apes in captivity.

"We often travel to zoos around the world to work with these animals, and we've often had the experience that when you come back years later, they seem to remember you clearly," said lead author Christopher Krupenye, a comparative psychologist at Johns Hopkins University. from Baltimore (Maryland, United States).

To carry out the research, the scientists collected eye-tracking data from 26 bonobos and chimpanzees housed in facilities in Japan, the United Kingdom and Belgium. Each animal was presented with an image of another animal of the same species and sex that they had not seen for at least nine months, but in some cases years or decades (the test subjects were between four and 46 years old, with an average age of almost 26).

 

https://www.nationalgeographic.es/animales/2023/12/bonobos-chimpances-memoria-largo-plazo-parecida-humanos