Video suggests that Capuchineraffe -Kidnap -Baby -Showler Monkeys, say scientists, say | Environment

Scientists have discovered surprising evidence of what they call monkeys, while checking video material from a small Panamaic island. Capuchin monkeys were worn between 2022 and 2023 at least 11 howler babies.

“This was a shocking knowledge,” said Zoë Goldsborough, behavior ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour in Germany. “We haven't seen anything like this in the animal kingdom.”

The motivations of the monkeys remain examined. Capuchins are house cat-size monkeys in South America and Central America. They are durable, clever and learn new behaviors. A group of Capuchins in Panama even learned to use stone tools to crack nuts and seafood.

Goldsborough and other researchers from Max Planck and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute had set up more than 80 cameras to examine the use of Capuchins in Capuchin, but were surprised that the first Howler -Babies appeared in early 2022.

The film material showed that the Capuchins went on their backs with baby hats and knocked their stone tools. But cameras did not capture the moments of kidnapping, the scientists probably appeared in the trees, where howls spend most of the time.

“Our window in this story is limited,” said co-author Margaret Crofoot by Max Planck and The Smithsonian. The results were published on Monday in the magazine Current Biology.

In most or in all cases, the baby died, researchers said. Howler monkeys for children would usually be worn by their mothers during care. All babies in the video – from a few weeks to a few months in old age – were too young to be weaned.

“A hopeful part of me would like to believe that some have fled and have gone back to their mothers, but we don't know,” said Crofoot.

The videos recorded some cases of young Capuchin men who still wore howler babies who had died, probably hungry. Many animals – from gorillas to orcas – have been observed how they wore their own dead descendants, although scientists are not sure what reasons.

Why did the Capuchin men do that? There were no signs of deliberate aggression towards the babies and they were not eaten, which excluded predators.

“We spent every hour to protect our brain why they would do that,” said Goldsborough.

The first baby snatcher may have had a confused “caring motivation” or a parental instinct because he interacted with infants, she said. Then four other men copied his actions.

The researchers said they did not believe that the Capuchins intentionally injured the babies. So far, only one group of Capuchins has been kidnapped by Capuchins.

Research shows the “remarkable behavioral fluctuations between social groups of the same kind,” said Catherine Crockford, a primatologist at the CNR's Institute for Cognitive Sciences in France, which was not involved in the study.