New impressive behavior elephant recently diagnosed by scientists in Germany.

The protagonist of his find is Rang Pha, an Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) from the Berlin Zoo who uses his proboscis to peel bananas before eating them.

Pang Fa, in addition to peeling bananas, basically separates them, which indicates the taste in flavors.

First, lead researcher Lena Kaufmann at the Humboldt University in Berlin began working with intelligent mammals to study how the animals perceive touch with their proboscis. Soon Pang Fa’s guardians began informing the researcher about her other activities, such as peeling a banana. Kaufman did not believe them. To find out for himself, he began to feed the elephant.

“I started bringing them bananas. But nothing. He just took a banana and ate it. So I started to doubt what they were telling me,” she says.

However, Kaufman gave the elephant green bananas, that is, unripe ones, so Pang Fa simply swallowed them whole. But when Kaufman gave her ripe bananas, with brown spots on the yellow peel, the elephant grabbed the banana and carefully peeled it, so that only the inside remained.

Turns out he had preferences. The unripe ones he ate whole, and the sweeter ones he peeled, but not overripe.

“When I gave her a brown banana, she threw it away and left it there. Then, when I gave her the second derivative, she immediately threw it at me,” she says.

After repeated experiments, Kaufman learned that Pang Fa could, on rare occasions, peel and eat an overripe banana, but she clearly didn’t like it.

Pang Pha was not taught to peel bananas. Instead, researchers believe she acquired the skill by watching her caretakers peel bananas for her.

In particular, they suggest that this behavior is due to her unusual childhood experiences. When she first arrived at the Berlin Zoo, she was raised by a dedicated caretaker who, contrary to custom, peeled her bananas.

“She thought it was stupid to eat whole bananas, so she always peeled them for herself. We think that’s where it all started,” explains Michael Brecht, a Humboldt-based neuroscientist and one of the study’s authors.

Kaufman then studied how and when she peels bananas in social situations—when she is with other elephants and offered bananas. In most of these cases, the elephant ate the bananas without peeling them, except for the last one.

According to Kaufman, this behavior is an example of how she adjusts her attitude to her own advantage: with individual feeding, she can peel her bananas freely. But in the group she had to eat quickly, fearing that the other elephants would leave nothing for her. So, for practical reasons, he swallows them whole, except for the last one, which he cleans to enjoy.

The remarkable features of the elephant have been recorded in review of current biological.

Source: LiveScience/New York Times.