Wild chimpanzees plan their breakfast time, type and location

How do our close relatives, the chimpanzees, acquire sufficient food when times are lean? By studying wild chimpanzees in the Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, provide a clear example of how great apes can acquire extra energy needed to maintain large, costly brains. They show that chimpanzees make their sleeping nests more en route to breakfast sites containing fruits that are more competed for by other daytime fruit-eaters than other fruits. Moreover, the researchers found that they leave their nest earlier (and often in the dark when leopards are more likely to attack) for these fruits in order to arrive before others, especially when the breakfast sites were far away.