{"id":28044,"date":"2025-05-19T15:00:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-19T15:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=28044"},"modified":"2025-05-19T15:24:56","modified_gmt":"2025-05-19T15:24:56","slug":"this-was-odd-capuchin-monkeys-kidnapped-howler-monkey-babies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=28044","title":{"rendered":"This Was Odd: Capuchin Monkeys Kidnapped Howler Monkey Babies."},"content":{"rendered":"

Male capuchin monkeys on a Panamanian island were documented carrying around infant howler monkeys for no clearly discernible reason.<\/p>\n

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Capuchin monkeys don\u2019t generally hang out with their neighbors, the howler monkeys, on Jicar\u00f3n island off Panama. So the image of an infant howler monkey clinging to the back of a white-faced capuchin confused Zo\u00eb Goldsborough, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. She came across it in 2022 while scouring footage from remote cameras on the island.<\/p>\n

Eventually, she and her colleagues came to a startling conclusion that they described on Monday in the journal Current Biology<\/a>. Young male capuchins on that island, they say, on a variety of occasions have abducted howler monkey infants and carried them around for days. The infants often died from dehydration or starvation.<\/p>\n

\u201cLooking at the footage and not knowing what was going to happen was somewhat like watching a horror movie that was being written,\u201d said Brendan Barrett, an evolutionary anthropologist at the institute and the dissertation adviser to Ms. Goldsborough. Both ordinarily focus on capuchin stone tool use<\/a>, not monkey-napping and infant murder, and are also affiliated with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Chronologically, the first sighting of a white-faced capuchin monkey carrying a howler infant.<\/span>Brendan Barrett\/Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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From January 2022 to July 2023, researchers documented<\/a> 11 different howler monkey babies being carried by five young male capuchins. The trend appears to have been set by Joker, a male capuchin so nicknamed because of a small scar on the side of his mouth. Other juvenile capuchins seem to have imitated him months later.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Neither the study authors nor outside experts who reviewed the research believe the abductors intend to harm the babies. Dr. Barrett compared the capuchins to children who capture lightning bugs in jars and fail to release them before the insects die in captivity.<\/p>\n

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Male capuchin monkeys on a Panamanian island were documented carrying around infant howler monkeys for no clearly discernible reason.Capuchin monkeys don\u2019t generally hang out with their neighbors, the howler monkeys, on Jicar\u00f3n island off Panama. So the image of an infant howler monkey clinging to the back of a white-faced capuchin confused Zo\u00eb Goldsborough, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. She came across it in 2022 while scouring footage from remote cameras on the island.Eventually, she and her colleagues came to a startling conclusion that they described on Monday in the journal Current Biology. Young male capuchins on that island, they say, on a variety of occasions have abducted howler monkey infants and carried them around for days. The infants often died from dehydration or starvation.\u201cLooking at the footage and not knowing what was going to happen was somewhat like watching a horror movie that was being written,\u201d said Brendan Barrett, an evolutionary anthropologist at the institute and the dissertation adviser to Ms. Goldsborough. Both ordinarily focus on capuchin stone tool use, not monkey-napping and infant murder, and are also affiliated with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.Chronologically, the first sighting of a white-faced capuchin monkey carrying a howler infant.Brendan Barrett\/Max Planck Institute of Animal BehaviorFrom January 2022 to July 2023, researchers documented 11 different howler monkey babies being carried by five young male capuchins. The trend appears to have been set by Joker, a male capuchin so nicknamed because of a small scar on the side of his mouth. Other juvenile capuchins seem to have imitated him months later.Neither the study authors nor outside experts who reviewed the research believe the abductors intend to harm the babies. Dr. Barrett compared the capuchins to children who capture lightning bugs in jars and fail to release them before the insects die in captivity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28046,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28044"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28047,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28044\/revisions\/28047"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}