Food preferences 57writing this book, Kennedy Andama (field assistant) and Catherine O’Hara (research
student) observed Black (adult male) feeding on wasp larvae:
On Tuesday 29 April 2003 at 11.50 a.m., Black (BK) was followed to block F0 where he met
Duane (DN). After 30 min of mutual grooming and resting, DN displayed and moved off to block
ED. BK started to follow but delayed in block F0 where he was heard to break some branches of a
small tree. When he emerged from the block he climbed up on to a low level horizontal branch
close to the trail and was observed to eat something he had carried with him and that resembled
honeycomb. He appeared to interject the eating of the comb with eating of leaves of an adjacent
climber (unidentified). The leaves were being wadged together with the comb. BK remained eating
for 15 min until all the substance he was holding was finished. DN remained close by with Wilma
(WL) (with maximal swelling) but neither showed any interest in what BK was eating.
After BK finished eating Kennedy (field assistant) returned to the place where BK had been
heard breaking branches and found a damaged wasp nest in the tree with some thin honeycomb-like
structures on the ground underneath. Within the nest matrix were white/transparent eggs
containing wasp larvae. It appears that this was what BK had been feeding on.Very occasionally we have come across the Sonso chimpanzees eating honey. An incidence
reported by Sean O’Hara (pers. comm.) was as follows:
Last Friday afternoon [in April 2003] we came across Jambo who was seated eating a large
honeycomb. Nick, Janie and Janet were sitting on the ground beside him trying to put their faces
close but Jambo ate it alone. He was there for several minutes. When they moved off we found a
small piece of the honeycomb on the ground and there were a couple of live bees. About 4 m away
was a Celtis zenkeritree with a sloping trunk. About 5–10 m up was a hole in the upper surface and
we could see bees flying around the entrance. Their defence seemingly wasn’t fierce. (This was
recorded in the Events Book by two Field assistants, Monday and Ogen.)Food preferences
Among the main factors that determine chimpanzees’ food preferences are the properties
of the foods themselves and the nature of chimpanzees’ taste preferences. We know
rather little about the latter. Some research on chimpanzees’ sense of taste has been done
(see Hladik and Simmen 1996 for a review). The question of taste in another species is
complicated by the fact that we have to deduce what tastes they like and dislike from
their reactions (eating rapidly and wanting more versus spitting out and avoidance); this
is normally done in experimental situations to avoid confounding factors. Thresholds of
ability to taste can also be documented in experiments in captivity. Nishida et al. (2000)
describe the taste of a large number of chimpanzee food species to humans, noting that
chimpanzees are able to tolerate species that to humans taste unpleasant, bitter or astrin-
gent as well as others that taste neutral or sweet. They refer to studies that show that the
foods of Cercopithecinemonkeys are less palatable to humans than those of chim-
panzees and that these species have developed more effective internal mechanisms for