|
|||
|
"Long
before it's in the papers" |
|||
|
RETURN TO THE WORLD SCIENCE HOME PAGE Monkeys may make “comments”
Sept.
2,
2004
Or is it? Some monkey utterances could best be described as comments, researchers have found in a new study. Henrik Brumm and colleagues at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, catalogued the sounds that barbary macaques – a type of monkey – made while watching their peers interacting. Some of the calls seemed to be comments or observations made by one monkey about others in the group, the researchers said. Brumm and his team based the finding on the following observations. First, many monkeys made noises while looking toward other monkeys, but out of earshot of the monkeys at whom they were gazing. These noises were instead within earshot of still other monkeys. Second, these sounds were made especially often in response to situations that these macaques are known to consider interesting, such as ones involving newborns or involving conflict. Third, it was possible to some extent to correlate the type of sound with the type of situation; for instance, conflict situations were associated with longer calls. All these facts suggest the monkeys, who were living in a semi-free situation in a fenced-in area of a park, were “commenting” to their peers about what they were seeing, the researchers write in the Aug. 14 online edition of the journal Primates. The types of calls Brumm's team documented, he said, are different from any reported before. Previously observed primate vocalizations were llimited to calls directed toward each other and not involving third parties, he explained in an email, such as “aggressive or affiliative calls towards a given group mate,” or alarm calls alerting the group that predators are near. While the content of the “comments” is unclear, the calls could be interpreted as evaluations of the goings on, or simply as look-what’s-happening attempts to direct attention to them, the researchers added. This and other new data “suggest that commenting is widespread among primates,” they wrote. The primate utterances could possibly reveal "what they think about the things going on around them," Brumm added in his email. "The commenting phenomenon may prove to be suitable as a tool to study social behaviour in primates from the primates' point of view," which in turn "may help us to better understand primate social interactions and social cognition." —EJL |
