Wild minds: how do apes learn about and use their physical environments?

Project background
Wild orangutans (Pongo spp.) face a diverse range of physical, cognitive, and emotional challenges, including fluctuating food availability, navigating a dynamic forest canopy, gaining mechanically complex nest-building skills, travelling for long distances, and coping with threats such as snakes, habitat loss, and lethal conflict with humans. Because of these difficulties, rehabilitated and released orangutans can struggle with adapting to the wild. In order to successfully adapt, rehabilitated orangutans must be resilient to these challenges and demonstrate perseverance in the face of adversity. This project uses a combination of different research methods in order to address the issue of psychological resilience in captive great apes.
Aims and objectives
1. Resilience literature review. The aim of this study is to systematically summarise the existing literature on human and animal resilience. The objectives are as follows
1.1: Gain an understanding of the key components of resilience.
1.2: Summarise common resilience-building methods used for humans and their effectiveness.
1.3: Summarise common resilience-building methods used for animals and their effectiveness.
1.4: Make recommendations for potentially effective resilience-building methods in the context of orangutan rehabilitation centres.
2. Lockdown study. Understand the effect of visitor presence/absence on great ape behaviour.
2.1: Compare the social, exploration, and stress-related behaviours of orangutans and gorillas during periods of time with and without significant visitor presence.
2.2: Trial a new methodology for categorising posture, to see whether specific postures are correlated with stress-related behaviours.
3. Resilience study. Trial a resilience building method in captive gorillas and orangutans.
3.1: Compare the persistence (length of time attempting to use device) between control and treatment group.
3.2: Compare the success rate (number of times tool is used to retrieve food successfully) between control and treatment group.
3.3: Compare total time spent manipulating of browse between control and treatment group.
4. Novel object study. Assess personality traits in captive gorillas and orangutans.
4.1: Compare latency to approach (indication of neophobia) between all individuals.
4.2: Compare time spent manipulating object and type of manipulation (indication of exploration style) between all individuals.
4.3: Compare success at obtaining food reward (indication of problem-solving ability) between all individuals.
5. Case study: Jiwa. Assess tool using ability in orangutan with cognitive and developmental abnormalities.
5.1: Assess Jiwa's ability to use tools.
5.2: Trial training method to demonstrate tool use and break tool use down into simplified stages.
5.3: Identify key developmental stages in Jiwa's development and compare these with average ages for Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii).
Novelty of the research methodology
The research methodology includes a variety of methods, including literature reviews, behavioural observations, and experiments. The resilience-building experiments will involve a novel apparatus requiring tool use, designed to encourage persistence and problem-solving in non-human great apes.
Potential applications and benefits
The findings of this research will be made available to the Orangutan Veterinary Advisory Group, based in Indonesia, which is a group of orangutan conservationists. It is hoped that this research will help to inform future rehabilitation techniques in the area of great ape resilience.