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.
Perry is a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and she’s been studying white-faced capuchins (Cebus capucinus) at Lomas Barbudal since 1990. Each day in the field, she and her colleagues get to observe these monkeys’ curious interactions, some of the quirkiest behavior in the animal kingdom.