Capuchin Monkeys - Rio De
Janeiro Zoo August 1972
The February 2003 issue of
BBC Wildlife magazine arrived this morning and a quick glance
through it came to a sudden halt at some photographs of New World
monkeys using stones as tools. The author described finding out
(some time after 1992) about this behaviour from an ex animal-trafficker
who reported that the monkeys (capuchins) had been doing this
for years near his home in the Amazon rain-forest, but it doesn't
say how many years.
The excellent pictures had
me searching through boxes of pictures that I took when Sheila
and I spent a summer in South America in 1972. The images above,
taken in Rio zoo are the result. Cropped from much larger images,
they are nothing like the quality of those in the magazine, but
they show clearly the same behaviour!
The concrete slab they are
on was surounded by water and seemed to be their anvil to do
the cracking. You can see the marks all over its surface. In
the left hand picture, the monkey in the foreground is a thief.
It waited for the other monkey to crack the nut and then rushed
in to grab it before the stone was put down. We watched them
for ages in amazement. They carried the stones around with them
as they searched for more nuts and returned to the slab numerous
times as we watched.
Their quality is not very good,
but the following links will take you to larger versions of the
photographs:
The pair of monkeys ...........The
individual nut cracker
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