Chimpanzees display the widest repertoire of tool-use strategies of any non-human animal. Across their African range, they crack nuts with hammerstones, fish for termites with slender probes, and fashion sticks to harvest ants and algae. These behaviours vary from community to community, a pattern long interpreted as evidence of cultural transmission — knowledge that is learned socially rather than inherited genetically. But the precise mechanisms by which a young chimpanzee actually acquires these skills have remained surprisingly difficult to pin down. Young apes spend years watching their mothers, yet observation alone seemed insufficient to explain how they eventually handle fragile tools and dangerous prey with such competence. The new study addresses that gap by focusing on the moments when tools and food physically change hands.

The research team, led by Andreu Sánchez-Megías and R. Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar of the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Psychology and the Jane Goodall Institute Spain, with contributions from Laia Dotras, Jordi Galbany, Adrián Arroyo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, studied western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) at Dindefelo, a savannah habitat in southeastern Senegal. Between 2017 and 2025, the researchers deployed camera traps at 14 sites where the chimpanzees used tools or proto-tools, capturing footage of four distinct technological behaviours. This non-invasive method allowed the team to record natural interactions without disturbing the animals, building a long-term video archive of social exchanges centred on tools and food.

The most striking pattern to emerge concerns the transfer of objects. At Dindefelo, chimpanzees pass wooden sticks to one another for fishing algae, extracting ants and catching termites, and they also share baobab fruits, which must be cracked open by striking them against stone or wooden anvils. According to Sánchez-Megías, first author of the article and a doctoral researcher in the Department of Social and Quantitative Psychology at the University of Barcelona, this transfer of tools and fruits represents a form of teaching that mothers appear to use to help their offspring learn tool-use behaviours. In other words, the mother does not simply tolerate her child’s presence; she supplies the very objects the child needs to practise, effectively lowering the barrier to entry for skills that would otherwise take years to develop through trial and error alone.

The footage also captured rarer and more remarkable episodes. In one case, a mother carried her offspring to a tool she had previously left inserted in an ant nest, so that the young chimpanzee could pull it out covered in ants — a moment that combines tool provision, guided access to the task, and an immediate edible reward. In another, a young chimpanzee apparently accompanied, encouraged and helped another immature individual that was attempting to crack open a hard baobab fruit by striking it against a rocky surface. Such episodes suggest that facilitation is not confined to mothers: juveniles, too, may play a role in supporting the learning efforts of their peers, hinting at a broader social scaffolding around technological learning than researchers had previously documented in this population.

Most opportunities for tool transfer among the Dindefelo chimpanzees arise when one individual takes a tool from another, with the owner tolerating the taking or simply leaving the tool behind. This passive tolerance is itself significant, because it creates a learning environment in which inexperienced individuals can handle the exact implements used for a task without competition or interference. But the study reveals that experienced individuals sometimes go further, actively facilitating tool use. Notably, females at Dindefelo may receive tools more frequently than males, and tool facilitation — carried out particularly by adult females but also by juveniles — contributes directly to the acquisition of tool-use behaviours in young chimpanzees. The researchers interpret this asymmetry as consistent with the central role mothers play in their offspring’s technological education.

From a technical standpoint, the study distinguishes several social learning mechanisms operating in parallel. Tool and fruit transfers constitute one mechanism, effectively a form of active teaching in which a knowledgeable individual provides materials or opportunities to a learner. Alongside this, the authors describe observation and supervised practice as additional mechanisms mediating the acquisition of technological behaviours. R. Adriana Hernández-Aguilar, Serra Húnter Professor at the University of Barcelona and co-research director at the Jane Goodall Institute Spain, notes that these cases suggest other social learning mechanisms are involved beyond simple transfer, mediating how young chimpanzees come to master complex foraging techniques. Supervised practice, in particular, implies that adults monitor and support immature individuals as they attempt tasks, rather than leaving learning entirely to independent exploration.

The evolutionary implications are considerable. Teaching has long been considered rare in the animal kingdom, with well-documented examples limited to a handful of species such as meerkats and some birds of prey. Evidence for teaching in our closest living relatives bears directly on questions about the origins of human pedagogy. If wild chimpanzees routinely facilitate learning through tool provision, guided access and encouragement, then the roots of instructional behaviour may predate the split between the human and chimpanzee lineages millions of years ago. The Dindefelo findings also carry weight for debates about chimpanzee culture, because active facilitation would accelerate the transmission of techniques and help stabilise behavioural traditions within communities, much as formal and informal teaching does in human societies.

The savannah setting adds another layer of interest. Unlike the lush rainforests where most chimpanzee studies have been conducted, Dindefelo is a mosaic of savannah and woodland, an environment often compared to the habitats in which early hominins evolved. Documenting teaching and facilitation in such a setting suggests that these behaviours are not confined to one ecological context and may be flexible responses to the demands of different habitats. The baobab fruit cracking documented at the site, involving stone and wooden anvils, echoes the nut-cracking traditions of West African chimpanzees and provides a comparable window into how percussive technology — a precursor to some of the earliest archaeological stone tool behaviours — might be learned and passed on.

The authors are careful to note that further research at Dindefelo will be needed to determine whether the chimpanzees there exhibit teaching and facilitation patterns different from those observed elsewhere. Expanding studies to other locations, they conclude, will allow comparisons across habitats, chimpanzee communities and technological behaviours of varying degrees of complexity, clarifying the role that teaching and facilitation play in each. For now, the video record from Senegal stands as a vivid demonstration that the line between watching and teaching is thinner than once believed — and that in the forests of Dindefelo, a mother’s decision to hand her child a stick may be one of the oldest classrooms on Earth.

Subject of Research: Teaching and tool-facilitation behaviour in wild savanna chimpanzees at Dindefelo, Senegal

Article Title: How adult chimpanzees teach young ones to use tools

Article References: How adult chimpanzees teach young ones to use tools. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: chimpanzees, tool use, social learning, teaching, animal culture, Pan troglodytes verus, Senegal, savanna chimpanzees, primatology, behavioral ecology, Frontiers in Psychology, University of Barcelona

The findings, coordinated on the Barcelona–Tanger–Barcelona route by professors Odei Garcia-Garin and Manel Gazo of the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) at the University of Barcelona, are striking in their scale and simplicity. Between June and July, three scientific campaigns recorded a total of 707 observations of marine megafauna along 19 fixed shipping routes in the western Mediterranean and the Adriatic. The species recorded were mainly the eight cetaceans commonly present in the Mediterranean: the fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus), the sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), Cuvier’s beaked whale (Ziphius cavirostris), the common dolphin (Delphinus delphis), the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus), the striped dolphin (Stenella coeruleoalba), Risso’s dolphin (Grampus griseus) and the long-finned pilot whale (Globicephala melas). Two species of sea turtle were also documented: the loggerhead seaturtle (Caretta caretta) and the green seaturtle (Chelonia mydas).

What makes the SYNFONY approach technically powerful is its reliance on fixed routes sailed repeatedly and simultaneously across a wide geographic area. Because the ferries follow the same transects on every campaign, each survey functions like a repeated sampling grid laid over the sea. When all routes are surveyed within the same narrow time window, the resulting dataset provides a broad, simultaneous snapshot of where cetaceans and sea turtles are concentrated at that moment. This is a fundamental advantage over opportunistic sightings or single-vessel surveys, which tend to sample different areas at different times and therefore struggle to distinguish real shifts in animal distribution from simple differences in survey effort. In effect, the commercial ferries become genuine platforms for observing marine biodiversity, gathering data on the presence and distribution of species along the routes they regularly sail.

The human dimension of the project is equally notable. More than 20 volunteers have taken part in the campaigns, mainly students from the University of Barcelona’s degree programmes in Biology, Marine Sciences and Environmental Sciences. These trained observers stationed aboard the ferries carry out the systematic visual surveys that generate the data. The project is carried out with the support of ferry lines and shipping companies, whose cooperation transforms routine passenger services into a monitoring network of remarkable reach. Garcia-Garin and Gazo emphasized the importance of this collective effort, thanking all the volunteers who, as observers on board, made the campaigns possible, as well as the shipping companies and all the people and institutions who contributed to the development of the project, noting that their participation and commitment is key in continuing to expand knowledge of Mediterranean marine biodiversity and advancing its conservation.

Among the clearest results of the campaigns is evidence that distribution patterns can change dramatically between one survey and the next, over intervals of only a few weeks. The striped dolphin offers a vivid example. Garcia-Garin and Gazo, from the UB’s Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences, explained that during the first campaign the species was observed more frequently and across a wider distribution area, whereas in the third campaign the sightings were much more spatially concentrated, especially on one of the routes in the Spanish corridor. Such rapid contraction and concentration of sightings suggests that these animals respond quickly to shifting environmental conditions, prey availability or other pressures, and that any static picture of their distribution is likely to be outdated within a season.

The fin whale, the Mediterranean’s only regularly occurring baleen whale and an emblem of the basin’s open waters, told a different story. The number of fin whale sightings remained relatively stable across the three campaigns, but the researchers found that the species’ distribution along the different routes underwent considerable changes. In other words, the overall abundance of observations stayed roughly constant while the locations where the whales were detected shifted substantially between campaigns. This decoupling of abundance from distribution is precisely the kind of pattern that only a synoptic, repeated-transect design can detect reliably, and it carries direct implications for conservation measures such as the placement of speed restrictions or the timing of protective measures in whale aggregation areas.

Sea turtles added further evidence of rapid spatial variability. The loggerhead turtle was the most frequently observed taxon across the entire monitoring period, underscoring its prominence in the Mediterranean’s surface waters. However, the experts noted that the number of observations decreased from the first campaign to the subsequent ones, while changes in its distribution within the network of monitored routes were also detected. Because loggerhead turtles are highly vulnerable to bycatch and vessel strikes, knowing when and where they concentrate, and how quickly those concentrations move, is essential information for fisheries managers and shipping operators alike.

SYNFONY does not operate in isolation. The project is being developed as part of the Fixed Line Transect Mediterranean Monitoring Network (FLT Med Net), coordinated by the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA), of which IRBio-UB has been a member for almost 10 years. This broader initiative draws on more than two decades of experience in collaboration with shipping companies, meaning that the new campaigns rest on a long institutional foundation rather than a one-off effort. The integration of university researchers, national environmental agencies and private ferry operators represents a model of how large-scale marine monitoring can be achieved without dedicated research vessels, which are expensive to operate and limited in geographic coverage.

The practical motivation behind all this data collection is the growing overlap between maritime traffic and marine megafauna. Shipping is one of the pressures that may overlap spatially and temporally with the presence of cetaceans and turtles, whether through the physical risk of collision, underwater noise or other disturbances. The data obtained by SYNFONY can contribute to developing new dynamic risk assessment models that integrate the presence of the species, the intensity of maritime traffic and environmental conditions within a single framework. Unlike static maps that fix protection zones in place year after year, dynamic models can adjust predictions as animals move and as traffic patterns change, allowing management measures to follow the risk rather than lag behind it.

The researchers’ stated aim is to be able to identify more precisely which areas and which periods present a potential increased risk to marine megafauna and to advance towards a better understanding and management of the Mediterranean marine space. In a sea shared by dozens of nations, intense shipping lanes and a fragile community of long-lived, slow-reproducing species, that goal is ambitious. But the message from the 707 sightings gathered in just a few weeks of ferry-based observation is clear: the Mediterranean’s whales, dolphins and turtles are not stationary, and the tools used to protect them must be just as mobile as the animals themselves. With volunteers, universities, agencies and shipping companies pulling in the same direction, the region now has a working template for watching its giants in near real time.

Subject of Research: Ferry-based monitoring of cetacean and sea turtle distribution in the Mediterranean Sea

Article Title: Tracking the fin whale and the sperm whale in the Mediterranean

Article References: Tracking the fin whale and the sperm whale in the Mediterranean. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: fin whale, sperm whale, striped dolphin, loggerhead turtle, Mediterranean Sea, marine megafauna, ferries, SYNFONY, University of Barcelona, maritime traffic, cetacean survey, dynamic risk assessment