A new technique has uncovered orangutans are dependant on their mothers’ milk longer than any other primates, and probably any mammal, sometimes not being weaned until eight or nine. The technique used to demonstrate this could tell us a lot about how our ancestors raised their young.
Few animals produce new offspring before weaning siblings, so persons under the age of weaning is an important indicator of reproduction rate. For elusive species such as orangutans, it is not so easy to find out when weaning occurs in the wild, nonetheless. A newspaper in Science Advances notes Nursing behavior is notoriously difficult to study in arboreal primates, particularly when offspring suckle inconspicuously in nests.
First author Dr Tanya Smith of Griffith University previously demonstrated milk consumption leaves a residue in teeth, distinguishing milk contribution to diet as the teeth were formed. In the new newspaper, she utilizes this technique to teeth held in museums from the days when orangutans were still shot for collections.
In addition to showing these orangutans were still drinking their mother’s milk until the age of eight for a Bornean orangutan, and almost nine for one from Sumatra, Smith’s work uncovered seasonal cycles in meat intake.
The orangutan fed on milk almost exclusively for the first year of life. After this their meat consumption varied, living on fruit when it was abundant but surviving on their mother’s milk when times were tough. The writers propose this is because infant orangutans absence the fat storages that allow adults to survive periods of scarcity, so they access these indirectly, through the mother. Nevertheless, increases in milk consumption were associated with periods of weight loss.
Smith’s work relies on barium levels. Barium shares transport pathways in the body with calcium( and result, but hopefully there’s not too much of that ). Consequently, when nursing moms draw on calcium in their bones to feed their young, the milk also concentrates barium, leaving a lasting legacy in the young ones’ mouths.
Smith told IFLScience her technique is harder to apply for species whose teeth develop more rapidly, but for primates, and particularly apes, it should be widely applicable. Although teeth from early human fossils are hard to access for destructive testing, her operate potentially offer an opportunity to trace the history of breastfeeding through human evolution. She’s also keen to study ancestral orangutans from the days when they roamed through much of Asia, to see if other contexts rendered most reliable food supplies.
Smith said her work could also help assess when orphaned orangutans are ready to be released into the wild. Primarily, nonetheless, she Hopes it highlights how vulnerable “they il be” … since they can’t replace themselves fast.
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