Scientists find monkeys who know how to fish
Groups of long-tailed macaques were observed four times over the past eight years scooping up small fish with their hands and eating them along rivers in East Kalimantan and North Sumatra provinces, according to researchers from The Nature Conservancy and the Great Ape Trust.
The species had been known to eat fruit and forage for crabs and insects, but never before fish from rivers.
New behavior in our cousins? WTF? And who, besides George Allen, cares about macaques anyway?
We do, for what they can tell us about ourselves. If macaques as a species can learn how to fish, we can learn, as a species, to do something equally pathbreaking in our quest for survival. Such as growing our own vegetables again. Using "new" sources of energy like the sun and wind.
"It's exciting that after such a long time you see new behavior," said Erik Meijaard, one of the authors of a study on fishing macaques that appeared in last month's International Journal of Primatology.
Meijaard, a senior science adviser at The Nature Conservancy, said it was unclear what prompted the long-tailed macaques to go fishing. But he said it showed a side of the monkeys that is well-known to researchers — an ability to adapt to the changing environment and shifting food sources.
"They are a survivor species, which has the knowledge to cope with difficult conditions," Meijaard said Tuesday. "This behavior potentially symbolizes that ecological flexibility."
If macaques can do it, why can't we? Can the macaques encourage us as to our ability as a species to adapt and change? Not only to a changing environment, but also to a new kind of politics?
For many years, money research focused on chimps. This was important in several respects, among them:
- The dismissal of seeing "man the toolmaker," as unique. In trying to justify our arrogant views of ourselves as somehow sthpecial, scientists had long settled on our tool-making abilities as one of our defining characteristics.
For First Time, Chimps Seen Making Weapons for Hunting
Chimpanzees living in the West African savannah have been observed fashioning deadly spears from sticks and using the tools to hunt small mammals — the first routine production of deadly weapons ever observed in animals other than humans. The multistep spearmaking practice, documented by researchers in Senegal who spent years gaining the chimpanzees' trust, adds credence to the idea that human forebears fashioned similar tools millions of years ago. The landmark observation also supports the long-debated proposition that females — the main makers and users of spears among the Senegalese chimps — tend to be the innovators and creative problem solvers in primate culture.
Since the tool discovery with chimps, we see everyone from ants to fish using tools. And we see, not only do chimps make tools, they make weapons. [I will leave aside for the moment the creative props being given to the breasted side of the species, as well as our keen interest in weaponry.]
Further research also makes us throw out another long-held belief:
- That man is the only species that makes war on his own kind. A little too much access to Animal Planet throws that belief out the window: Watch the chimps and meerkat groups jockey with other groups for territory. Learn how upcoming chimp alpha males attack and sometimes kill the old leader. MacBeth! Or how the mother meerkat leader, growing displeased with her daughter, banishes her from the group. King Lear!
Watching Animal Planet far too much these days has reawakened an early fascination with alternative modes of social organization. What I am finding most moving is that there are always grey areas: the so-called Law of the Jungle is often tempered by mercy and compassion. Not about food (but when was the last time you went to the supermarket, shopped, and then threw your burger back in the meat section?), but about dealing with transgressions or the aging out of power.
And maybe we can take a lesson from Barack Obama here, at the risk of putting his name in a Macaque story. I think we have all been [appalled, impressed, disgruntled] at his lack of the jugular instinct--the way he draws back before making the personal kill. Sometimes there were so many nasty comebacks he could have delivered in his debates with Hillary, but he didn't. He doesn't mock his opponents in that take-no-prisoners way that sometimes feels SO satisfying to political junkies like Kossacks, and yet which makes us bridle when it's used against out own candidate.
In the same way that we, as eco-Dems, recognize the need for adaptive behavior re food and energy and can take a page from the macaques, can we also moderate our go-for-the-kill instinct? Can we let John McCain, with his teeth yellowed by age and illness, live in grace? Can we pull back from the cheap shots about Hillary Clinton AND Cindy McCain? The things I've seen written about her here have made my blood run cold.
Can we, like the meerkats and the chimps, show the quality of mercy? Can we, like the macaques, adapt not only to a new environmental ecology, but also to a kinder, gentler political ecology, where the Law of the Jungle (the blogosphere) gives us the right to verbally kill and eviscerate our opponents but in which we decide to pull back, and maul them, perhaps, or give them the cold shoulder to for a while, but somehow leave space for readmitting them into the tribe?