Remembering Ai, a remarkably intelligent chimpanzee: NPR

The death of a possible genius was reported this week.

Ai, a chimpanzee born in West Africa who arrived at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University in Japan at the age of one, died of natural causes at the age of 49. It is said that she was surrounded by staff who knew her.

By the way, Ai means love in Japanese. She was remarkable.

“She was the first chimpanzee to successfully label numbers,” Tetsuro Matsuzawa, primatologist and former director of the Kyoto Primate Research Institute, wrote in 2021 for the international journal Inference. It was when she was five years old.

At age six and a half, she began learning the alphabet and soon, Matsuzawa says, she “was able to distinguish between all 26 capital letters. By age seven and a half, Ai had learned the lexigrams for apple, banana, carrot, cabbage,” and more. She was ultimately able to identify over 100 Japanese Kanji characters and 11 different colors.

Matsuzawa said in one study that when Ai was shown an apple, she chose a rectangle, a square and a dot on a computer screen to virtually draw an apple. Ai would have enjoyed drawing and painting in her free time. One of his designs was printed on a scarf given to the late primatologist Dame Jane Goodall.

In 1989, Ai slipped out of her cage and retrieved a key to open the cages of Akira, another research chimpanzee, and their friend Doudou, an orangutan.

An escapade, moreover, with all the makings of a primate heist film: Ai’s Three?

It’s always dangerous to try to step into someone else’s shoes, human or primate, but I like to think that Ai’s restless intelligence made her curious about the world beyond the confines of her research institute.

However, the monkeys’ escape did not last long; a few graduate students called Dr. Matsuzawa to report that Ai was walking around campus with the key in his mouth. Well, did you think chimpanzees would carry Birkin bags? When Ai met the students, she allegedly showed them her butt. This is considered a sign of deference among primates – even humans – and Ai and his companions were sent back to the laboratory.

Ai leaves behind a 25-year-old son, Ayumu, who is also said to be extremely intelligent. Human scientists will continue to learn from him, and he from them. Like mother, like son.