Washington – A baby howler monkey Clinging to the back of a major male monkey, its small fingers grabbing fur. But they are not related and not even the same species.
The scientists saw surprising evidence of what they describe as monkey kidnappings while reviewing video images of a small island in Panama. He Capuchin monkeys They were seen with at least 11 howls between 2022 and 2023.
“This was a very shocking finding,” said Zoë Goldsborough, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for animal behavior in Germany. “We have not seen anything like this in the animal kingdom.”
The motivations of the monkeys remain under investigation. Capuchins are homemade monkeys found in South America and Central America. They are long life, intelligent and learn new behaviors from each other. A group of Capuchins in Panama has even learned to use stone tools to break nuts and seafood.
Goldsberg and other researchers from Max Planck and the Tropical Research Institute Smithsonian had established more than 80 cameras to study the use of the Capuchin tool, but were surprised to see that the first howmers appear in early 2022.
The images showed the Capuchins walking and hitting their stone tools with baby howls on the back. But the cameras did not capture the moments of kidnapping, which the scientists said they probably happened in the trees, where the howmers spend most of their time.
“Our window to this story is limited,” said Co -author Margaret Crophoot by Max Planck and Smithsonian. The findings were published on Monday in the magazine Current biology.
In most or all cases, babies’ howmers died, the researchers said. Children’s monkeys would normally be transported by their mothers while they still breastfeed. All babies in the video, from a few weeks to a few months of age, were too young to be weaned.
“A hopeful part of me wants to believe that some escaped and returned to their mothers, but we don’t know,” said Crophoot.
The videos recorded some cases of young cappuiners who still wear howlers who had died, probably because of starvation. Many animals, from gorillas to Orcas – It has been observed carrying their own dead offspring, although scientists are not sure of the reasons.
Why did Capuchin males? There were no signs of deliberate aggression towards babies and were not eaten, discarding predation.
“We have all spent hours twisting our brains why they would do this,” Goldsborough said.
The first cischero baby could have had a “affected” motivation “or an instinct of the parents, because he showed kindness interacting with babies, he said. Then four other men copied their actions.
The researchers said they do not believe that the Capuchins damaged babies on purpose. Until now, it is only known that a group of Capuchins kidnap.
The research shows the “notable behavioral variation between social groups of the same species,” said Catherine Crockford, a primatologist at the CNRS Institute of Cognitive Sciences in France, which did not participate in the study.
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