Theft of Baby Howler Monkeys for no reason is the trend with bored young male caws … and scientists have no idea why

Paris, May 20 -A new trend is to catch from bored young male coffins: kidnapping of baby -showers monkeys, in which scientists were first recorded that animals were recorded that steal the babies of other species for no obvious reason.

The PHD student Zoe Goldsborough first noticed something wrong in 2022 when he sent through movement-controlled cameras on Jicaron, an island off the Panama coast.

“I was very shocked” to see a Capuchin monkeys with a white face with a Howler Monkey on my back, Goldsborough, a researcher at the German Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior, told AFP.

The scientists called the Capuchin joker because the small scar on the mouth was reminiscent of the “Batman” evil weight.

After checking more film material, they discovered Joker with four different Howler Monkey babies.

At first they thought that this was the “heart -warming story of a strange capuchin who accepted them,” said Goldsborough, the main author of a new study in the magazine Current Biology.

Then the scientists found other cases in which Joker was not involved. They finally watched five Capuchins, who wore 11 different howler children over a period of 15 months.

Then the team discovered film material by sad Howler Monkey parents who demanded their lost babies and showed that the infants had actually been kidnapped.

A fatal trend

The researchers were confused because the Capuchins had not eaten the babies or ate it to the victim, they still seemed to have seemed to play with them.

Goldsborough said that they finally realized that these kidnaps were a social tradition or a “fad” among the young male coffins of the island.

It is the first time that a species repeatedly kidnaps the infants of another due to the spread of such a tradition, said the co-author of Study, Brendan Barrett, AFP.

The trend came with a high price: four howler babies were died as died, but the researchers believe that nobody survived.

Just like the Capuchins manage to kidnap the babies, there is a mystery.

The kidnapping probably takes place in the trees, and the cameras only cover the floor in the Coiba National Park of the island.

“They are very successful in it because they apparently can even get one or a two -day child from his mother,” said Goldsborough.

The Capuchins do not suffer any injuries, even though adults are reverberate.

Cultural fashions that spread in animals are rare, but not unknown.

Barrett previously examined Capuchin in Costa Rica, who suddenly started to cultivate stored pigs before she had bored from the trend.

And in the 1980s, killer whales took dead salmon on the heads in front of the northwest of the US coast.

This trend returned decades later when Orcas was discovered again last year.

“Agents of the Chaos”

The researchers started recording the Capuchins in 2017 because they cleverly use stone tools to crack nuts and shellfish.

The Capuchins have no predators and a lot of food on the island, so they have a lot of free time to play around.

“You are a small way of discovering chaos,” said Barrett.

While this additional time could lead to socially learned traditions such as the use of tools, this could also lead to “apparently arbitrary things”, as the howlinged offices steal, he said.

The study only included kidnappings that were recorded by July 2023, but Goldsborough said that at least one more baby has been recorded since then, although they did not go through the entire film material.

There may have been a decline in the kidnaps just because the Capuchins have fewer babies to steal – the island's howler monkeys are classified as endangered.

The researchers also want to investigate whether the normally engraving Howler monkeys will become more anxious or aggressive for the previously harmless Capuchins. – AFP