SONG: “National Primate Home.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on “Call for NIH research chimpanzees to be retired”, Nature, 6 July 2012, as used in the post “Chimp retirement plan.”.

ABSTRACT: This was written in response to the latest SongFu2012 prompt, from Ken Plume (the fellow who organizes the [...]

Here’s an ape with plenty of character – plenty of, dare I think it, soul.

This is not the first image from Brehm’s Tierleben (or “Brehm’s Life of Animals”) to have been featured on these pages. But it may be the one with the most thoughtful quality. This chimpanzee was alive before the Civil War broke out – before [...]

That’s the idea behind a study by University of Oxford and the University of Auckland researchers in PhysOrg. The scientists found that our ability to live in lots of different social settings is what sets us apart from other primates:

The study analysed patterns of social groups among living primates, as well as examining the ‘the root’ of the [...]

Not people hunting chimpanzees, Scientific American reports, but chimpanzees hunting monkeys:

According to a study published May 9 in the American Journal of Primatology, this is the first documented case of a nonhuman primate significantly overhunting another primate species.

(The taxonomy of Ugandan red colobus monkeys is in dispute. Some scientists consider them a species, Procolobus tephrosceles, whereas [...]

It’s really hard to beat the Christian Science Monitor’s headline on this story…. Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts:

“Human evolution occurred alongside primate evolution from a common mammalian ancestor,” [Kenji Onishi, an assistant professor of behavioral sciences at Osaka University,] told LiveScience. “Therefore, it is important to learn the evolution of primates in understanding the previous steps [...]

Science Daily spoils the myth of the peaceful forest apes that live idyllic lives with no concept of ownership. Apparently, the brutes fight long wars over land rights:

During a decade of study, the researchers witnessed 18 fatal attacks and found signs of three others perpetrated by members of a large community of about 150 chimps at Ngogo, Kibale [...]

Nature says it’s true: Rhesus monkeys will trade items of value – in this case, juice – in return for sexy monkey booty shots:

The researchers gave captive male rhesus macaques two options: a drink of cherry juice, or a different-sized shot of juice and the chance to look at one of a range of pictures of their [...]

And, Wired says, we’re just about able to understand their vocabulary… and their grammar:

Lemasson’s team previously described the monkeys’ use of calls with specific meanings in a paper published in November. It detailed the monkeys’ basic sound structures and their uses: “Hok” for eagle, “krak” for leopard, “krak-oo” for general disturbance, “hok-oo” and “wak-oo” for general disturbance in [...]

OK, not monkeys, but apes, New Scientist says, have been caught making musical instruments:

The orang-utan’s music, if you can call it that, is actually an alarm call known as a “kiss squeak”.

“When you’re walking the forest and you meet an orang-utan that not habituated to humans, they’ll start giving kiss squeaks and breaking branches,” says Madeleine Hardus, a [...]