As the above clip shows, researchers have recently found that with practice, baboons can tell the difference between real four letter written words and strings of four letters that are not words. Even more impressively, after training they can even pick out new real words they have never seen before, suggesting that they are able to learn that certain letter combinations are more likely to be actual words than are other strings of letters.
[via Monkeys in the News]
In today’s clip, troops of baboons kidnap and raise young feral dogs to be loyal to their group and eventually act as guards against other wild canines that would otherwise be a threat.
When a bush baby at a sanctuary in Nairobi needed a parent, a baboon spontaneously took it under its wing.
At Knowsley Safari Park in the UK, zookeepers had to issue warnings to tourists not to enter the baboon area of the park if their cars had rooftop luggage. Why? The baboons had figured out how to open the containers, and worked in groups to do so, with the largest monkeys jumping up and down on top of the luggage box until the locks burst, and other monkeys running in for the prizes inside of it. In an effort show vacationers the extent of the ongoing problem, zookeepers even sent in a volunteer carload of staged tourists and videotaped the result:
[Metro.co.uk via The Telegraph, image by Splash News]
When a leopard kills an adult baboon but notices its victim’s day old baby left behind, the leopard saves it from other predators and cares for it through the night.
In a recent study examining apes’ awareness of their knowledge of situations, when apes of different species were directly shown which of two tubes contained a reward, they chose that tube without delay when given the chance to have one, but when apes were unsure which tube held a reward, they examined their options before grabbing their choice.
[Animal Cognition] via [PhysOrg], [image by Josep Call]
