Like other elephants, Pang Pha — a female Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) handraised by human caretakers in the Berlin Zoo, Germany — consumes green or yellow bananas as a whole. She rejects brown bananas but, unlike other elephants, when on her own she peels yellow-brown bananas. Pha peels faster than humans by a partially stereotyped sequence of behaviors: she breaks the banana, shakes out and collects the pulp, and discards the peel. When yellow-brown bananas are offered to a group of elephants, she changes her behavior and consumes all bananas as a whole with exception of the last banana, which she retains for later peeling. Banana peeling appears to be rare in elephants and none of the other Berlin elephants engage in peeling, raising the question why only Pha peels bananas.
Banana-peeling behavior of the female Asian elephant Pang Pha depends on banana ripeness and is suppressed in social feeding experiments. Image credit: Kaufmann et al., doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.076.
“We discovered a very unique behavior,” said Dr. Michael Brecht, a researcher with the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
“What makes Pang Pha’s banana peeling so unique is a combination of factors — skillfulness, speed, individuality, and the putatively human origin — rather than a single behavioral element.”
Like other elephants, Pha eats green or yellow bananas whole. She rejects brown bananas outright.
But when it comes to yellow bananas spotted with brown — the kind one might reserve for banana bread — she eats after peeling them first.
Dr. Brecht and colleagues made the discovery after learning from Pha’s caretakers about her unusual banana-peeling talent.
At first, they were confused. They brought Pha nice yellow and green bananas, and she never peeled them.
“It was only when we understood that she peels only yellow-brown bananas that our project took off,” Dr. Brecht said.
When yellow-brown bananas are offered to a group of elephants, Pha changes her behavior.
She eats as many bananas as she can whole and then saves the last one to peel later.
Banana-peeling appears to be rare in elephants as far as anyone knows, and none of the other Berlin elephants engage in peeling. It’s not clear why Pha peels them.
The researchers note, however, that she was hand raised by human caretakers in the Berlin Zoo. They never taught her to peel bananas, but they did feed her peeled bananas.
Based on this, the authors suggest she acquired peeling through observational learning from humans.
“Elephants have truly remarkable trunk skills and that their behavior is shaped by experience,” Dr. Brecht said.
The study appears in the journal Current Biology.
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Lena V. Kaufmann et al. 2023. Elephant banana peeling. Current Biology 33 (7): 257-258; doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.076
