奇速英语

A particularly smart elephant from the Berlin Zoo has grabbed the attention of scientists after demonstrating a rare, human-like behaviour: she can peel bananas. The elephant is Pang Pha, a middle-aged Asian elephant. She is the focus of a new study that analyzed her banana-peeling behaviour.

Pha was brought to the Berlin Zoo as a baby in 1987. At the time, she was still being partially bottle-fed by her handlers (驯兽员). Her main caretaker consistently fed her peeled bananas, and the handler would peel them directly in front of her. The researchers report that Pha was “never formally conditioned to peel bananas” but likely picked up the skill by observing her human caretakers.

The Berlin Zoo reached out to Brecht, a professor of neurobiology(神经生物学) at Humboldt University and the senior author of the paper and his team, and told them about their clever elephant, but when researchers arrived to observe her behaviour, they found it was hard to get Pha to consistently peel bananas. 

Researchers learned that they could consistently get Pha to peel bananas when they offered her ripe, brown-speckled (褐色斑点的) bananas. Pha doesn’t open bananas like humans do, by peeling from the stem (茎). Instead, she cracks the banana in half down the centre with her trunk then slams it on the ground to release the soft fruit inside. After shaking the peel off, she eats the banana. 

Researchers observed Pha being fed bananas in the same place as other elephants and noticed she would eat “like a machine”, not wasting time to peel so she could snag more fruit. But when it came down to the last banana, 60 per cent of the time, Pha would save it and peel it.

As for why Pha peels bananas, researchers have no way of finding out. It’s possible she prefers the taste of peeled bananas. As for why she only peels yellow-brown bananas, it may have something to do with the ease of peeling the fruit at various stages of ripeness.