OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING OF BABOONS AND AVOIDANCE OF MIMICS: EXPLORATORY TESTS

Grand Total 1 Present address: Institut de Neurophysiologie et Psychophysiologie, 13274 Marseille 2, France. Observational ("empathic") learning in food choice by bands of baboons was proposed in this journal by Gans (1964) to explain the resemblance of various African vipers to each other, as well as the resemblance of a totally harmless colubrid snake, Dasypeltis scabra, to these vipers, in areas where the snakes coexist with Papio cynocephalus. Baboons are known to eat snakes, even attacking highly poisonous ones, but eyewitness reports suggest that there exists an ageinduced caution (Cans, 1964). As a fatal snake bite can hardly be useful as a lesson to a bitten baboon, only observational learning is likely to provide a way of training for these potential predators. It is also indicative (Pasteur, 1972) that snakes in the viper-Dasypeltis mimicry system have dull colors rather than yellow, orange or red (see Gans, 1961), so that they are not aposematic to birds while their coloration may nevertheless serve as a warning for Old World primates. Revealingly, the only birds that are dangerous to vipers (namely, Accipitriformes) are also the only birds that possess a color vision similar to that of Old World primates. Discrimination of objects through punishing stimuli and reinforcement is the only kind of discrimination relevant to protective mimicry. Unfortunately, very few studies exemplify observational learning of such discrimination in animals, and reviews say very little specifically about it. Cook et al. (1969) observed that three attacks on distasteful butterflies by birds of a two-species tropical avian community sufficed to deter all birds in the community from further attack on these insects and their mimics. In studies with captive animals (Klopfer, 1957, 1959; Sexton and Finch, 1967, with birds; and Stephenson, 1967,