Charlton Heston – Punkey Fighter #1

To the brave pioneer who showed us what might happen if we let the monkeys gain control

1923 – 2008

 

Call of the Wild

More disturbing facts about the Punkeys. Not only are they criminals, out to destroy humanity, but they’re righteous pervs too!

From New Scientist:

There’s something kinky going on in the world of Barbary macaques. Researchers have found the males eavesdrop on their mates having sex in order to make sure they don’t miss out on the fun – and to give their sperm a chance to compete in the great fertilization race.

Female Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus) cry out during sex. When they are fertile, the call stimulates ejaculation in the male. When the females are infertile, they slightly modify the structure of the call, making the male less likely to ejaculate. Fertile females sometimes make non-ejaculatory calls as well.

Dana Pfefferle of the German Primate Center in Göttingen and her colleagues recorded ejaculatory and non-ejaculatory calls produced by both fertile and infertile females in “La Forêt des Singes”, a primate visiting centre in France where Barbary macaques roam freely.

We’ve already touched upon how bad this job was before. Perhaps “touched” is a bad word to use in this instance. Sorry!

They then hid a speaker in the park foliage, not far from a resting male, and played the recorded cries.

Males showed strong responses to ejaculatory calls. They turned around and looked in the direction from which the call came for roughly twice as long, and in some cases rose and approached the microphone.

Pfefferle made sure the recorded female was never around during the playback experiments, so the other males could not find her. Upon hearing the ejaculatory calls, males did however approach other females and checked their genitals for the swelling that indicates they are fertile.

Let’s be honest…who hasn’t checked for swollen genitals before? Isn’t this standard practice in dance clubs now?

 

First impressions count. Ask any chimp…

An interesting post about judgments from our sister blog The Power of Negative Blogging:

Think first impressions are important? So do chimps. They’re more judgmental than creationists! From Science Daily:

Chimpanzees make judgments about the actions and dispositions of strangers by observing others’ behavior and interactions in different situations. Specifically, chimpanzees show an ability to recognize certain behavioral traits and make assumptions about the presence or absence of these traits in strangers in similar situations thereafter. These findings are by Dr. Francys Subiaul – from the George Washington University in Washington DC – and his team.

Character judgments are an essential feature of cooperative exchanges between humans, and we use them to predict future behavioral interactions. A system for attributing reputation is therefore expected in any species which needs to assess the behavior of others and to predict the outcomes of future interactions. Chimpanzees have sophisticated social skills and there is evidence that primates eavesdrop and benefit from third-party interactions. Could they have a system for forming reputation judgments across a wide variety of contexts like humans?

Sounds like they are getting their own covert operations teams up and running! Does CIA stand for Chimp Intelligence Agency? If we don’t keep an eye on them it might.

 

Monkeys Overexposed like Paris Hilton, Only Smarter

I have always said these monkeys are too public. The more publicity, the less we put our guard up against the Punkeys and their diabolical plot to take over. But some argue, the more publicity, the less we think they are endangered. From ABC News:

From CareerBuilder commercials to “Lancelot Link,” a sitcom following the hi-jinks of a 1970s psychedelic detective agency, Hollywood has employed primates, particularly chimps, for years to make audiences laugh.

But according to conservationists, those smiles come with a dark side.

“My gut feeling is that there is some level of public trust in what’s allowed and what’s not. When you go to the grocery store, food is FDA approved. Nothing that you consume is going to be bad for your health,” said Kristen Lukas, curator of conservation and science at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo and a co-author of the paper. “I think there’s that similar public trust that if you see something like this on TV, how bad could it be? If chimps are endangered, how could they be used this way?”

Nothing you consume at the store is going to bad for you? If it’s on TV how bad could it be? Does this person ever leave the house? Or watch TV? Look at almost everything on FOX. That’s just the dregs of humanity being shown on television like a freak show. And food recalls happen all the time.

 

Talk monkey with me

For those of you who do not believe in evolutions, hold on to your halos because the Punkeys are getting more advanced with each passing day. They can now “talk” in broken sentances! From LiveScience:

The ability to string different words together to express complex ideas was a milestone in the development of language that researchers figure occurred relatively late in human evolution.

Now for the first time, scientists reveal a primate other than humans can also express a variety of messages by combining sounds into different sequences. The finding suggests this level of language might have occurred far earlier in evolution than before thought.

Researchers focused on putty-nosed monkeys (Cercopithecus nictitans) in Nigeria. They studied alarm calls the males made.