Look, no hands! Watch this elephant’s unique way of peeling a banana

BERLIN, Germany — Turns out you don’t need opposable thumbs to do things like peel a banana! Pang Pha, an Asian elephant at the Berlin Zoo is making headlines for her unique way of peeling back bananas. Rather than imitating humans, she has devised an ingenious method of getting her favorite treat — without the pesky peel.

Pang Pha first breaks the banana before shaking it out and collecting the pulp with her trunk, leaving behind the thick peel. This unorthodox method may have come from watching her caretakers peel bananas. If so, it shows yet another example to an elephant’s intelligence and manipulative abilities.

“We discovered a very unique behavior,” says Michael Brecht, a researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, in a media release. “What makes Pang Pha’s banana peeling so unique is a combination of factors—skillfulness, speed, individuality, and the putatively human origin—rather than a single behavioral element.”

Continued below.