It is not new that we humans are not the only animals to feel pain for the death of a loved one: many other species, from elephants to different primates, know what mourning is, and manifest their suffering unequivocally. But also unmistakable: each species has a way of its own to express its condolence in the face of death. A study just published on Biology Lettersfor example, explains that, like other primates, macaques also cross a period of mourning after the death of a family member, who does not look like that of us humans at all.
Mourning mothers. The study, conducted by a team of anthropologists from the University College of London, involved 22 female macaques living at the Caribbean Primate Research Center in Cayo Santiago, off the coast of Puerto Rico. Of these 22 females, 11 had just lost a child, while the other 11 were studied as a control group.
The macaques were monitored for two weeks, looking for behavioral signals connected to recent mourning: quantity of sleep, drop in appetite, nerve walks, excessive “scratching” … all these behaviors have been recorded and quantified, to identify the phases of the mourning of the macaques and their duration.
The mourning of the macaques. The results tell us that macaques live mourning in the opposite way to us humans. For us it is normal to first pass a phase of “rest”, or in any case of apathy and poor activity: the Macache Mothers, on the other hand, passed the first two weeks after the death of the son practically one step away from insomnia, with a short period of frenetic activity during which they spent most of their time looking for food, walking or scratching.
To this brief but intense period of hyperactivity, which as mentioned is opposed to the typical human reaction, however, a equivalent period of “despair” was not followed, whose typical signs are lethargy and loss of appetite: having the initial phases of mourning, the macaques have returned to do their usual life. Compared to us humans, therefore, the macaques live the mourning more intensely in the early stages, and they “consume” it just as quickly.
