A baby howler clung to the rear of a major male monkey, his small fingers grabbing fur. But they are not related and are not the same species.
The scientists saw surprising evidence of what they describe as monkey kidnappings while reviewing video images of a small island in Panama. Kapuchin monkeys were seen with at least 11 howlers between 2022 and 2023, the researchers said Monday.
“This was a very shocking finding,” said Zoë Goldborough, an ecologist at the Max Planck Animal Behavior Institute in Germany. “We have not seen anything like this in the animal kingdom.”
The motivations of the monkeys remain under investigation. The Kapuchinos are homemade monkeys the size of a cat found in South America and Central America. They are long life, intelligent and learn new behaviors from each other. A group of hoods in Panama has even learned to use stone tools to break nuts and seafood.
Brendan Barrett/Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior through AP 
Goldsberg and other researchers from Max Planck and the Tropical Research Institute Smithsonian had established more than 80 cameras to study the use, but were surprised to see that the first howmeric babies appear in early 2022.
Goldborough initially found four different howls babies being transported. In almost all cases, the culprit was the same subadult man. The scientists nicknamed the Joker Hoodchin because the little scar on the side of his mouth reminded the villain “Batman.”
At first, scientists thought this was the “moving history of a strange hood that adopts thesis babies,” Goldborough said.
Then, the researchers began to find other cases that did not involve Joker. The scientists were baffled because the hoods did not eat or take advantage of the babies, nor seemed to enjoy playing with the subject.
Goldborough said they realized that these kidnappings were a social or “fashion” tradition among the young male bells of the island.
Kinding destination for kidnapped babies
The images showed the hoods walking and hitting their stone tools with baby howls on the back. But the cameras did not capture the moments of kidnapping, which the scientists said they probably happened in the trees, where the howmers spend most of their time.
“Our window to this story is limited,” said Co -author Margaret Cross by Max Planck and Smithsonian. The findings were published on Monday in Current Biology magazine.
In most or all cases, babies’ howmers died, the researchers said. Children’s monkeys would normally be transported by their mothers while they still breastfeed. All babies in the video, from a few weeks to a few months of age, were too young to be weaned.
“A hopeful part of me Wimsss to believe that some escape and return to their mothers, but we don’t know,” Cross said.
The videos recorded some cases of hooded male young people who still carry howlerors who had died, probably because of starvation. Many animals have been observed, from gorillas to orcs. Leading to their dead descendantsAlthough scientists are not sure of the reasons.
Why did the males of the hood? There were no signs of deliberate aggression towards babies and keep it away, discarding depredation.
“We have all spent hours twisting our brains, why would they do this?” Goldborough said.
The first Baby Snatcher could have had a “affected” motivation “or instinct of the parents, because it showed a kindness interacting with babies, he said. Then four other men copied their actions.
The researchers said they do not believe that the Hapuchinos damaged the babies on purpose. Until now, only a group of hoods is known to kidnap.
The research shows the “notable behavioral variation between social groups of the same species,” said Catherine Crockford, a primatologist at the CNRS Institute for Cognitive Sciences in France, which did not participate in the study.
The cultural fashions that extend between animals are strange but not unknown.
Barrett has previously studied the captains in Costa Rica who suddenly began preparing porcupines, before cultivating the trend.
And in the 1980s, Tok killer whales to get dead salmon in their heads off the northwest coast of the United States. This trend returned decades later when the Orcs were again seen with thesis “Salmon hats” last year.
Agance France-Presse contributed to this report.
