"Animal Culture" exhibit at the Great British Bioscience Festival

"Animal Culture: Nature's second inheritance system" is one of the engaging and exciting displays that will be on offer at the Great British Bioscience Festival on 14-16 November at the Museum Gardens in London's Bethnal Green, showcasing the best of British bioscience by BBSRC researchers.

The Animal Cultures team consists of Prof. Andy Whiten of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience as well as researchers from the University of Exeter, Newcastle University and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and Edinburgh Zoo.

The research behind the exhibit revealed cultural processes of varying complexity in primates, birds and fish (e.g. "The scope of culture in chimpanzees, humans and ancestral apes". Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, DOI:  10.1098/rstb.2010.0334; and further reading). Observational and experimental studies have identified cultural differences across different wild populations and have shown migrating individuals conforming to local group habits. Controlled experiments seeded foraging techniques in animal groups and mapped the spread of these techniques, creating local traditions. The team's discoveries highlight a potent ‘second inheritance system’ in animals that complements genetics. This illuminates human cultural evolution, and has implications in areas as varied as child development, robotics, welfare and conservation.

This free festival is accessible for all and will be the culmination of a yearlong programme of activities marking BBSRC's 20th anniversary – bringing together exciting exhibits from world-leading bioscience research groups.

The research is highlighted in the Leverhulme Trust Annual Review 2013.

Chimpanzees use at least 66 gestures to convey their intentions

School of Psychology researchers, Dr Catherine Hobaiter and Professor Richard Byrne, have identified at least 66 gestures that chimpanzees use to communicate with each other. Hobaiter spent two years studying and filming a large group of chimpanzees in Uganda, the first systematic study of their gesture in the wild. Shorter-term studies in captivity had suggested that each individual’s repertoire was different, but the new work has showed that these were just ‘subsets’ of the natural repertoire of all chimpanzees. In fact, the gestures of other members of the great ape family overlap: 24 chimpanzee gestures are the same in gorillas and orangutans, too. But, unlike most natural communication systems of animals, this ‘biological’ repertoire is used in an intentional way: chimpanzees target specific audiences, tailor their choice of gesture to whether they’re already attending (silent, visual) or not (contact), and persist and elaborate their gesturing if the target does not get the message. The next stage of the project is to determine what each of the gestures means.