It's monkey business at a Panama island

Male capuchin monkeys exhibit cultural innovation by kidnapping another species

- ELIZABETH LANDAU

CAPUCHIN MONKEYS DON'T generally hang out with their neighbors, the howler monkeys, on Jicarón island off Panama. So the image of an infant howler monkey clinging to the back of a white-faced capuchin confused Zoë Goldsborough, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. She came across it in 2022 while scouring remote footage from the island.

Eventually, she and her colleagues came to a startling conclusion that they described in the journal Current Biology. Young male capuchins on that island, they say, on a variety of occasions have abducted howler monkey infants and carried them around for days. The infants often died from dehydration or starvation.

From January 2022 to July 2023, researchers documented 11 different howler monkey babies being carried by five young male capuchins. The trend appears to have been set by Joker, a male capuchin so nicknamed because of a small scar on the side of his mouth. Other juvenile capuchins seem to have imitated him.