We ain’t monkeyin’ around here.
Tommy is a 26-year-old chimpanzee owned by a couple in upstate New York. He has a lawyer and a trust fund to have him declared the first animal considered a person under the law. The Boston-based Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) asked the court to free Tommy from what they describe as a "small, dank, cement cage... Continue Reading →
Maggie Koerth-Baker, senior writer for Boing Boing, recently wrote an article in the New York Times reviewing the behaviors of chimpanzees around mortality. She retells the death of a chimpanzee named Pansy, who died in captivity, at the Blair Drummond Safari and Adventure Park in Scotland, about 5 years ago. The death was imminent. Many... Continue Reading →
For as long as I've been alive, wild chimpanzees have been “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Captive-born chimps, however, have only been classified under the lesser class of “threatened.” Dan Ashe, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), announced today that the loophole that exempted captive-bred chimpanzees from the full... Continue Reading →
A paper published in the journal Behavioural Processes describes a rare phenomenon, midwifery behavior among black snub-nosed monkeys in Yunnan, China. The paper is titled, "Daytime birth and parturition assistant behavior in wild black-and-white snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus bieti) Yunnan,China," and documents this day time birth accompanied by a helper. As you may know, primates have... Continue Reading →
The bonobo genome is sequenced. The letter reporting was recently published in Nature, and is available openly under the title, "The bonobo genome compared with the chimpanzee and human genomes." Kay Prüfer from the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropologyis the lead author. There are some interesting preliminary comparisons such as: Bonobos and chimps have 99.6% sequence similarity... Continue Reading →
Eva Maria Luëf and Katja Liebal of the Free University of Berlin have published in the American Journal of Primatology a new paper documenting the occurrence of motheresein 24 captive lowland gorillas. During a 4 month observation of these gorillas, it was observed that elder gorillas used different gestures to start and stop play. To... Continue Reading →
A chimpanzee in at the Furuvik Zoo in Sweden is documented to store various projectile object to be thrown at zoo visitors at a later time. The results of this study has been published in PLoS One, "Spontaneous Innovation for Future Deception in a Male Chimpanzee." I think its a pretty fascinating discussion of foresight,... Continue Reading →
Infanticide and cannibalism are two extreme behaviors seen in primates. Though extreme, the persistence of these behaviors in primates suggest that they are adapted for and had evolved to serve different purposes. Infanticide and cannibalism can be considered as both reproductive and survival strategies. Infanticide has always been associated with males killing off the progeny of former dominant males... Continue Reading →
Do you know that fossil primates once roam North America? I didn't know either so this discovery was a shock and a "d'oh" moment at the same time. Lingual view (side that touches the tongue) of Mescalerolemur horneri partial mandible. Scale bar equals 2 mm. Photo from Kirk & Williams (2011). Anywho ... A fossil... Continue Reading →
On April 13, 2011, The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore announced the birth of an Endangered Coquerel's Sifaka (Propithecus coquereli) making it one of only 50 individuals found in accredited institutions in the United States. Read the press release for more information! The Duke Lemur Center manages the United States' Coquerel's Sifaka population and provides more... Continue Reading →
