Cappuccini cebi are a kind of monkeys with four subspecies widespread in central and southern America. Intelligent and curious, their population attracted attention a few years ago when a study announced that had entered the stone age.
Now that same population, who lives on an island in the Panama channel, has climbed the honors of the news because he invented a new, very cruel hobby, which is spreading more and more among the males: kidnapped the puppies of other monkeys and bring them around on the back for days and days, as shown in the video below. The bizarre (and dangerous) behavior is documented in a study published on Current Biology.
Adoption or kidnapping? The story is long but we will summarize it in short: after “entry into the stone age”, the monkeys of jicarón (which is an uninhabited island and therefore an ideal laboratory to study the behavior of primates) were subjected to constant monitoring, with the installation of dozens of hidden cameras. While he was studying the shot of one of these cameras, the doctoranda Zoë Goldsborough, of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, noticed A cappuccino cebo that carried a aluatta puppy on the island of Coiba on his back, an endemic screaming monkey of Panama.
In the past there have been cases of cebi (and other primates) who “adopt” other monkeys, but adoptand was always a female. That of the movie, instead, He was a boythat Goldsborough renamed Joker. A further analysis of the shot revealed other cases of “kidnapping”, always perpetrated by the same monkey. Five months later these first discoveries, the park cameras pinched four other cebi, all of the age of Joker, with their puppy of the screaming monkey attached to the back.
Burn youth. Apparently, the ECBi do not hurt the puppies that kidnap, nor does it seem that their presence great obstacles. The problem is that Small aluatte need food, that the ECBs cannot obviously provide them with: the Goldsborough team witnessed the death of four puppiesand it is possible that the other kidnapped have done the same end.
The most interesting detail of the whole story is that, as mentioned, Joker belongs to the same population that had a sensation in 2018 for its use of stone tools: the other populations of the island, and those of the nearby island of Coiba, leave the other monkeys in peace.
According to the researchers, it is possible that The explanation of this difference is boredom: the cebi of that specific area live in a place full of resources and without predators, so adolescents find themselves with a free time bag availableand they constantly go in search of new ideas to fill it.
