by LAURA M. MACLATCHY & LAUREN SARRINGHAUS
Adolescents are known for risky behavior, with teenagers in the U.S. more likely than younger children to die from injury. But what’s responsible for this uptick in risk-taking around puberty?
Our new observations of physical risk-taking in chimpanzees suggests that the rise in risk-taking in human adolescence isn’t due to a new yen for danger. Rather, a decrease in supervision gives teens more opportunities to take risks.
We study locomotion in chimpanzees, one of humans’ closest relatives. It’s difficult to study physical risk-taking in people because it is not ethical to put anyone in danger. Chimpanzees are good alternative study subjects, since wild chimps of all ages need to move through the trees, often at great heights.
While working with us, Bryce Murray, an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, noticed that some of the movements that chimpanzees perform in the trees are more dangerous than others.
Typically, chimpanzees climb or swing while keeping a secure grip on branches. However, they also leap across gaps and sometimes let go of a branch entirely, dropping down to another branch or the ground. Unfortunately, they don’t always nail the landing. Years of observations in the wild have shown that falls are a major source of injury and even death among chimpanzees.
After watching these behaviors in chimpanzees, Bryce began to wonder whether their physical risk-taking follows the same patterns we see in humans. Do chimpanzees start taking more risks – like leaping and dropping from branches – once they enter puberty? Since there is evidence that human males take more risks than females, although this varies across cultures, we also wondered whether male chimpanzees are bigger risk-takers than females.
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