IFL Science: Stealing Baby Howler Monkeys Is Suddenly All The Rage Among Capuchins On Jicarón Island

 

Stealing Baby Howler Monkeys Is Suddenly All The Rage Among Capuchins On Jicarón Island



White-faced capuchin monkeys on Jicarón Island have started abducting baby howler monkeys, surprised scientists report. It’s possible this behavior comes in waves, but it had not been detected in the first five years scientists intensively studied the population, and now appears to be spreading widely. The reasons are still unknown, but the authors think adolescent male boredom may be at the heart of it.

Jicarón Island lies in the Pacific off the coast of Panama and forms part of Coiba National Park. The island’s isolation from the mainland makes it a natural laboratory for scientists observing monkey behavior. That research attracted global attention when some white-faced capuchin monkeys there were observed to have “entered the Stone Age”, using stones to break open coconuts and crabs.

The fact that this stone-cracking behavior seemed to be restricted to some of Jicarón’s capuchins, and not being taken up by other populations or on neighboring islands, intrigued primatologists enough to install cameras in the area. The researchers hoped to find out if the stone-cracking would spread and perhaps be developed on, but the cameras caught a more disturbing trend.

Capuchins have been filmed carrying howler monkey babies on their backs. In a children’s story, this would be a case of a kindly capuchin agreeing to play horsey with a baby howler to give the parents a break, but the reality is uglier.

Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior doctoral student Zoë Goldsborough was the first to spot the behavior while reviewing camera trap footage. “It was so weird that I went straight to my advisor’s office to ask him what it was,” Goldsborough said in a statement. Her advisor, Dr Brendan Barrett, considered it worth going through a year’s worth of data from every camera trap on the island so they "could reconstruct the scene to see if this weird behavior was just a one-off, or something bigger.”

After searching through tens of thousands of images and videos from 76 camera traps, Goldsborough found examples of four howler infants being carried by a capuchin, but the carrier was almost always the same monkey, whom Goldsborough called “Joker”.

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