Archive for May 11th, 2007
Japan’s odd couple – A primate-rodent friendship between Capybaras & Squirrel Monkeys
One of our more popular posts of all time has been the photos of the tiger and orangutan friendships I shared with you several months back.
To rekindle that interest, I’ve come accross a Reuters news piece on a similar friendship
… but this time it is between squirrel monkeys and giant South American rodents called capybaras. And it is all taking place in a Japanese Zoo, Tobu Zoo.
An interesting cultural sidenote, I was reading about capybaras last night and how in countries like Venezula and Brazil, the capybara is to Easter as turkeys are to the United States’ Thanksgiving. That’s because Catholics consider capybaras a fish, mind you, because they live in water and thus are not considered meat for Lent. Crazy, I know.
But I digress, the photo to our right is of one such compainionship between the two species. The news blip on this gets way too technical, hypothesizing whether this is a unique frienship or it can happen in the wild and injectures of meekness, etc. While both species inhabit South America,
“their paths do not cross — capybaras live on river banks while the monkeys live in forests.”
