Opinion: Remembering Ai, a remarkably intelligent chimpanzee

The death of a possible genius was reported this week.

Ai, a chimpanzee who was born in West Africa and came to the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University in Japan when she was a year old, has died of natural causes at the age of 49. They say she was surrounded by the staff who have known her.

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

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

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

Matsuzawa said in one study, when Ai was shown an apple, she chose a rectangle, a square, and a dot on a computer screen to draw an apple, virtually. Ai reportedly liked to draw and paint in her off time. One of her creations was printed on a scarf given to the late primatologist Dame Jane Goodall.

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

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

It is always hazardous to try to put yourself into someone else’s skin, 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.

The ape escape didn’t last long, though; a couple of grad students called Dr. Matsuzawa to report that Ai was strolling around campus with the key in her mouth. Well, did you think chimps would carry Birkin bags? When Ai encountered the students, she reportedly showed them her backside. This is considered a signal of deference among primates — if not humans — and Ai and her companions were returned to the lab.

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