This elephant found a more a-peel-ing way to eat her snack.
Just like humans, elephants love to eat bananas, but they don’t usually peel them first. They pick them up with their trunks and eat the fruit whole — peel and all.
An Asian elephant named Pang Pha who lives at the Berlin Zoo set herself apart from other elephants when she taught herself how to peel bananas with her trunk.
But the 36-year-old elephant has a refined taste and won’t just peel any banana.
If Pang Pha is given a green or completely yellow banana, she’ll swallow it whole with the peel still on. She refuses to eat a brown banana and will toss it to the side.
Yet if you give her a yellow banana with brown spots, she’ll use her trunk to break the banana in half and shake the interior out of the peel, eating the soft pulp and leaving the peel behind.
A team of researchers documented this elephant’s remarkable talent in a new report in the journal Current Biology.
“We discovered a very unique behavior,” Michael Brecht, a neuroscientist at Humboldt University of Berlin and one of the authors of the paper, said in a release. “What makes Pang Pha’s banana peeling so unique is a combination of factors — skillfulness, speed, individuality, and the putatively human origin — rather than a single behavioral element.”
The researchers believe Pang Pha most likely learned how to do this by watching humans peel bananas for her, showing that elephants have more cognitive and manipulative abilities than they let on.
Though it’s not clear why she peels her bananas, she was hand-raised at the zoo since she was brought there as a baby in 1987 and was fed peeled bananas by her human caretakers.
Even though Pang Pha prefers to eat her yellow-brown bananas peeled, she doesn’t like to show off her skills in front of other elephants.
When given a bunch of spotted bananas in a group of elephants, she’ll eat as many as she can whole and save the last one to peel and eat later.
As far as the researchers are concerned, banana peeling is very rare in elephants, and none of the other elephants at the Berlin Zoo peel their bananas like Pang Pha.
“Elephants have truly remarkable trunk skills and that their behavior is shaped by experience,” Brecht said.
Researchers hope to get further information by looking into other skills the elephant’s trunk might have, as well as wondering if these behaviors are passed down through elephant families.