![\"Aimi,](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/image8-copy.jpg\")
<\/p>\n CNN
\n \u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n Chimpanzees living in a sanctuary in Africa have developed a \u201cfashion trend\u201d for dangling blades of grass or sticks from their ear holes and their behinds, a new study shows.\n <\/p>\n
\n In 2010, researchers working at Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust chimpanzee sanctuary in Zambia observed how a female chimp started to dangle objects from her ear, and the behavior was soon copied by other members of her group, study lead author Ed van Leeuwen, an assistant professor of behavioural biology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told CNN on Wednesday.\n <\/p>\n
\n There was no evidence that the chimpanzees were using the grass or sticks to deal with pain or itches, and they were \u201cvery relaxed\u201d when they did it, Van Leeuwen said.\n <\/p>\n
\n The behavior is more of a \u201cfashion trend or social tradition,\u201d he added.\n <\/p>\n
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\n Interestingly, chimpanzees in a different group at the sanctuary started demonstrating the same behavior more than a decade later, with some also inserting objects into their rectums.\n <\/p>\n
\n As this group lived around nine miles from the first group, they couldn\u2019t have copied it from them, prompting Van Leeuwen to ask whether the chimpanzees\u2019 caregivers could have influenced them.\n <\/p>\n
\n As it turns out, the staff in one area of the reserve had developed a habit of cleaning their ears with matchsticks or twigs, while those on the other side didn\u2019t. <\/strong>\n <\/p>\n \n Van Leeuwen believes the behavior was picked up by chimpanzees from caregivers in the first area, before it was passed on to other members of their group.\n <\/p>\n \n The caregivers then also influenced the behavior in the second group, which they were looking after years later, before this group also developed the practice of inserting sticks and grass into their rectums.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThis is a trend that goes viral by means of social learning,\u201d he added. <\/strong>\n <\/p>\n \n Van Leeuwen also cited the example of a group of chimpanzees at a zoo in the Netherlands in which one female started walking as if she were carrying a baby even though she wasn\u2019t.\n <\/p>\n \n Soon, all of the females had adopted this walking style, he said. In addition, when two new females were brought into the group, the one that adopted the style swiftly was integrated quickly, whereas the one that refused to walk in the group style took longer to be accepted.\n <\/p>\n \n For Van Leeuwen, these behaviors are about fitting in and smoothing social relationships, just as with humans.\n <\/p>\n \n The grass behavior was mostly observed at leisure time, when the chimpanzees congregate to groom and play.\n <\/p>\n \n Living in the sanctuary, the chimpanzees don\u2019t have to worry about predators or competition with other groups, meaning they have more leisure time than their wild counterparts.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThey have a lot of time to just hang out,\u201d said Van Leeuwens.\n <\/p>\n \n Nonetheless, wild chimpanzees are probably capable of developing such behavior, he said, adding that it just might not have been documented yet.\n <\/p>\n \n Next, Van Leeuwens plans to study whether chimpanzees can repeatedly innovate new foraging techniques, to examine whether they can develop cumulative culture in the same way as humans.\n <\/p>\n \n Elodie Freymann, a post-doctoral affiliate at the University of Oxford\u2019s Primate Models for Behavioural Evolution Lab, who was not involved in the study, told CNN that these kinds of observations are key to advancing our understanding of the origins and transmission patterns of cultural behaviors in chimpanzees and other non-human animals.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThis study\u2019s finding that there may have been interspecies copying between chimps and their human caretakers is pretty mind blowing,\u201d she said.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIf chimps can copy humans, could they be learning from and copying other non-human species as well? It\u2019s an exciting moment in primatology,\u201d Freymann added.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CNN \u00a0\u2014\u00a0 Chimpanzees living in a sanctuary in Africa have developed a \u201cfashion trend\u201d for dangling blades of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":56512,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[159,67,132,68,837],"class_list":{"0":"post-56511","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-united-states","10":"tag-unitedstates","11":"tag-us","12":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114833944565461523","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/image9-20250709115940109.jpg\")
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