Feature

Monkey Business

Do the quirks of capuchins make them creatures with culture?

It's not easy keeping up with pint-size monkeys in the jungle. The teams of researchers who've been doing it for the past 14 years have had to put up with a lot: barreling face-first into spider webs before sunrise, hacking through dense, bug-infested undergrowth, getting droppings in their hair, and being heckled by cantankerous little monkeys called capuchins. Still, there's no place Susan Perry would rather be than the forests of the Lomas Barbudal Biological Reserve in Costa Rica.

NIBBLES FOR TWO. In the finger-in-mouth game, an adult bites down on a juvenile companion's finger. The young one's job is to free its finger, in what researcher Susan Perry calls a "slow, relaxed interaction." ~~ Perry/UCLA