There’s a serious case of stranger danger unfolding on an island off the coast of Panama.
A gang of five juvenile capuchin monkeys living on Jicarón Island has started abducting baby howler monkeys, researchers report May 19 in Current Biology. This bizarre fad, which has no clear purpose, is often deadly for abductees.
Capuchins “do such interesting, weird, quirky and sometimes dark things,” says Brendan Barrett, an evolutionary behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany. These behaviors “can offer a dark window of reflections into what we do.”
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