Orangutan fish eating, primate aquatic fauna eating, and their implications for the origins of ancestral hominin fish eating

This paper presents new evidence of fish eating in rehabilitant orangutans living on two Bornean islands and explores its contributions to understanding nonhuman primates' aquatic fauna eating and the origins of ancestral hominin fish eating. We assessed the prevalence of orangutans' fish eating, their techniques for obtaining fish, and possible contributors (ecology, individual differences, humans). We identified 61 events in which orangutans tried to obtain fish, including 19 in which they ate fish. All the orangutans were juvenile-adolescent; all the fish were disabled catfish; and most were obtained and eaten in drier seasons in or near shallow, slow-moving water. Orangutans used several techniques to obtain fish (inadvertent, opportunistic and deliberate hand-catch, scrounge, tool-assisted catch) and probably learned them in that order. Probable contributing factors were orangutan traits (age, pre-existing water or tool skills), island features (social density, water accessibility), and local human fishing. Our review of primates' aquatic fauna eating showed orangutans to be one of 20 species that eat aquatic fauna, one of nine confirmed to eat fish, and one of three that use tools to obtain fish. Primate fish eating is also site-specific within species, partly as a function of habitat (e.g., marine-freshwater, seasonality) and human influence (possibly fostered eating fish or other aquatic fauna at most sites, clearly induced it at some). At tropical freshwater sites, fish eating occurred most often in drier seasons around shallow water. Orangutan and primate findings are generally consistent with Stewart's (2010) reconstruction of the origins of ancestral hominin fish eating, but suggest that it, and tool-assisted fish catching, were possible much earlier.