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June 30 2011
Sexy Ad Campaign Targeting Monkeys Makes A Splash
“Advertising for monkeys” is just too good a phrase to pass up.
Even since ads created for a study investigating whether monkeys respond to billboards debuted at the Cannes Lions ad conference, the headlines have been flowing freely. We learn Yale primatologist Laurie Santos and two ad executives came up with the idea at last year’s TED, after Santos gave a talk on her experiments showing that monkeys that learn to use money are as irrational about it as we are.
Ad firm Proton has now developed two billboards to hang outside capuchin monkeys’ enclosures, and the researchers plan to see whether they will prefer one kind of food, or “brand,” over another when it is shown in close proximity to some titillating photos, including a “graphic shot” of a female monkey exposing her genitals and a shot of the troop’s alpha male with the food.
Once the monkeys have been exposed to the ads for brand A, scientists will see whether they show a preference for it over brand B, which won’t be supported with a campaign. In essence, they’ll investigate whether sex sells for monkeys. Brand A will be ...
February 22 2011
Self-Doubting Monkeys Know What They Don’t Know
The number of traits chalked up as “distinctly human” seem to dwindle each year. And now, we can’t even say that we’re uniquely aware of the limits of our knowledge: It seems that some monkeys understand uncertainty too.
A team of researchers taught macaques how to maneuver a joystick to indicate whether the pixel density on a screen was sparse or dense. Given a pixel scenario, the monkeys would maneuver a joystick to a letter S (for sparse) or D (for dense). They were given a treat when they selected the correct answer, but when they were wrong, the game paused for a couple seconds. A third possible answer, though, allowed the monkeys to select a question mark, and thereby forgo the pause (and potentially get more treats).
And as John David Smith, a researcher at SUNY Buffalo, and Michael Beran, a researcher at Georgia State University, announced at the AAAS meeting this weekend, the macaques selected the question mark just as humans do when they encounter a mind-stumping question. As Smith told the BBC, “Monkeys apparently appreciate when they are likely to ...
November 19 2010
Mother’s Fatty Diet Makes Baby Monkeys Afraid of Mr. Potato Head
What monkey mothers eat has a large impact on how skittish their offspring act in stressful situations like stranger danger–or the presence of a Mr. Potato Head in their cage.
According to researchers, even normal monkeys find the toy’s large eyes to be “mildly stressful.” But baby monkeys from mothers who were fed a high-fat diet (over 35 percent of calories from fat, modeled after a typical American diet) had a much stronger reaction to an encounter with the spud man, and also spazzed in the presence of an unknown human.
The study, presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual conference, found that in stressful situations, the female offspring were more anxious and the males more aggressive, explains LiveScience:
The babies of the moms on the fatty diet were overwhelmingly more freaked out by the toys and stranger, the researchers found. That was especially true of female monkeys, which were reluctant to approach the toys (although they responded eagerly to food). The male offspring of fatty-diet moms were more likely to behave aggressively, threatening the human intruder in the stranger test, for example.
The behavior didn’t seem to result from the mother’s body fat content–the attitude changes occurred in the children of both fat and lean monkey moms on the high-fat diet. When they looked closer, the researchers found that the difference might lie in the brain.
When they examined the brains of the offspring, researchers found disruptions in serotonin signaling, which normally provides a feeling of well-being. The researchers think that placental inflammation brought on by the high-fat diet exposed the monkey fetuses to proteins called cytokines, which are known to cause serotonin disruptions.
It also doesn’t seem to matter what the offspring eat themselves, study researcher Kevin Grove told LiveScience:
“Even if we take the offspring, after they’re weaned from their mothers, and put them back onto a normal, healthy diet, their susceptibility to stress and anxiety still remains,” Grove said. “This really appears to be a permanent issue that occurs in utero.”
You heard it here, potential mothers-to-be: Watch what you eat while pregnant, or your child could end up with a lifelong potato head paranoia.
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Image: flickr / beeep
November 08 2010
The Monkey Snuggle Market: How Much for a Quick Nuzzle?
In some monkey species, monkey moms use snuggle time with their babies as a commodity. Mothers will “sell” time with their children to other females in their colony for the price of several minutes of grooming. As Science News puts it, they have a “do my hair before you touch my baby” rule.
The research team who made this discovery, which was described in the journal Animal Behaviour, studied vervet monkeys and sooty mangabeys in the Ivory Coast’s Tai National Park. Newborn infants draw crowds of female monkeys who want to touch, hold, and make lip-smacking noises at the babies. Touching of the baby can be had for a price of a few minutes spent grooming its mother, though it’s not really known why female monkeys are so drawn to the young of others.
The researchers use the idea of a “market” to understand this behavior because the time put into the grooming fluctuates with the youth of the baby and the availability of other babies. The younger babies get more grooming time for their mothers, and if there are few other babies around for competition the “price” is driven up, explains Science News:
One newborn mangabey, for example, the only baby in its group at the time, earned about 10 minutes of fur cleaning and combing for its mom. In contrast another lone baby didn’t even earn four minutes of grooming once it had reached the advanced age of almost 3 months.
The mothers are also stingy with who gets to get closest to the baby, said Science News:
With enough grooming, moms permitted pretty much any female in their group to at least touch or sniff the baby. But it was mostly females with a history of grooming mom, presumably the well-known and accepted associates, who could actually hold the baby themselves.
Similar kinds of baby-trade markets have been observed in chacma baboons, long-tailed macaques, and spider monkeys. The process works the other way around in marmosets, where the moms pay others to hold the infants, but the researchers point out that marmosets frequently have twins, so an extra set of hands might be worth the cost.
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Image: Flickr/Tambacko the Jaguar
October 27 2010
To Find This Snub-Nosed Monkey, Follow the Sneezes
The locals living in a remote Burmese forest gave wildlife biologists very clear instructions on how to find a rare species of monkey: Just go out on a rainy day, and listen for sneezes in the treetops. The snub-nosed monkey has nostrils that point up, they said, and it sneezes when rainwater drips into its nose.
Even with these amazingly great directions, the biologists failed to photograph a live specimen of the Burmese snub-nosed monkey–the image at right is a digital reconstruction of what the monkey probably looks like. Still, their examination of skins and skulls in the villagers’ possession provided enough evidence to declare that the monkey was a new species that had never before been described in the scientific literature. BBC reports:
Although new to science, interviews with local people in the area revealed that they knew the Burmese species as mey nwoah, “monkey with an upturned face.”
The monkey lives in Myanmar’s northeastern state of Kachin, and is separated from the habitat of other snub-nosed monkey species by the Mekong and Salween rivers. In the researchers’ write-up in the American Journal of Primatology, they describe a monkey with a white beard and white ear tufts, prominent lips, and a long tail.
The researchers also estimate the new monkey’s population at between 260 and 330 individuals, which classifies it as critically endangered. The monkey is threatened by hunting, habitat lost to logging, and disruption due to a Chinese dam project on the Irrawaddy River.
Happily, the conservation group Fauna & Flora International, which was involved in the research, has taken an interest in the monkey. The BBC reports that the group hopes to halt hunting by “creating local pride” in the sneezy marvel.
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Images: Thomas Geissmann; Martin Aveling / Fauna & Flora International
July 14 2010
Jungle Cat to Potential Prey: Nobody Here but Us Monkey Babies
One pied tamaran turns to another: Do you hear that infant monkey call?
That’s one weird-sounding baby, the other responds. Shrugging their shoulders, the pair goes to investigate. Surprise! It’s not a baby monkey at all, but a margay cat doing impersonations. Then it’s up to the monkeys to escape becoming a snack.
In the domain of jungle tricks, monkeys usually take center-stage. They may give false alarms to steal bananas or (shamelessly) carry an infant to strike up a conversation. But the above fake-out scene, documented in 2005 by Wildlife Conservation Society researchers, hinted that at least one feline is giving monkeys a dose of their own medicine.
The small spotted margay won’t be winning any stand-up awards: Fabio Rohe, a researcher at the Society, told National Geographic that the cat’s impressions were “poor.” Though researchers watched the monkeys escape, they still found the ruse impressive, given that no other cat is documented to have used vocal mimicry in hunting (though some people claim to have heard similar strategies used by jaguars and cougars).
The margay’s acting skills may soon prove crucial, since the South American species is threatened by hunting, the pet trade, and habitat destruction. As National Geographic reports, researchers believe the cat may have other animals in its “repertoire” including macuco birds and agouti rodents.
Given its apparent skills and the fact that the seven-pound cat also eats lizards, perhaps the tongue-flick pictured here is only another act of cunning.
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Image: Wikimedia / Malene Thyssen
April 21 2010
How to Win Friends and Influence Monkeys
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