AR-News: (UK) Young female chimps upstage males

[Animalara2003 at aol.com]

BBC News
 
Chimps fashion stalks and twigs to get inside termite mounds
It would seem young female chimpanzees take their studies a little more 
seriously than their male classmates, a study in the journal Nature has shown. 
Females learn from their mothers how to gather termites much faster than 
males - who prefer to spend more of their time playing, US scientists say. 
Elizabeth Lonsdorf and colleagues conducted their research on wild chimps in 
Tanzania's Gombe National Park. 
They say the gender differences are similar to those seen in young humans. 
Girls and boys pick up fine motor skills such as writing at different rates, 
and the team suggests its research could therefore indicate that sex-based 
learning differences may have an ancient origin. 
Educationalists trying to develop learning strategies for children could find 
the work instructive, the scientists believe. 
"This finding is a heads-up to researchers studying the learning of 
relatively complex skills that they should take sex into account," said Dr Lonsdorf, 
the director of field conservation at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.






full story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3628363.stm










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“I personally cannot get overly worked up about the deprivation of human 
rights in a world where non-humans have no rights at all. Until animals and nature 
have rights, none of us have any rights at all because without animals, 
ecosystems and nature's diversity, rights are meaningless. Humans are a group that 
was never very successful to begin with. Overly territorial, obsessed with 
trivialities, violent, petty, and completely lacking in empathy for other 
species. The world would be a much nicer place without us." Captain Paul Watson 
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