Introduction
Arboreality simply means living in the trees. There are numerous species that live in trees for all or part of their lives, including a wide range of rodent species, monkeys and great apes, koalas, sloths, many species of birds (such as parrots), and lizards like chameleons and geckos. Some animals live both on the forest floor and in tree crowns, whereas others, like Sumatran orangutans, are almost exclusively arboreal, rarely descending from the tree canopy. Arboreality imposes unique cognitive demands on animals because of the physical structure of the environment: trees and their branches form a discrete and discontinuous surface on which animals can move, and the risk of falling means that animals need to choose safe supports that can bear their weight in order to travel safely. In addition, food may be patchily and unpredictably distributed in three-dimensional space, so the cognitive demands of finding and processing food and of creating safe and comfortable places...
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Thorpe, S.K.S., Chappell, J. (2019). Arboreality. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1414-1
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