Keeping it on the Down Low

What do you call a female that screams for the men, only to keep quiet from the other women so she can have all the men to herself? Normally the word “whore” would spring to mind. Well, that’s exactly what female chimps do in the wild. And depending on the male, she’ll go wild for high ranking males while barely making a peep for lowly joe shmoes. From Science News:

When a chimp has sex in the forest, will she make a sound?

Depends in part on who’s listening, literally, says a scientist who has spent months recording chimp sex sounds in the wild.

With lots of other females within earshot, a female chimp typically doesn’t give a call, says Simon Townsend of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. With a largely male audience, though, she’s more likely to give what primatologists call copulation squeaks or screams.

And partners matter. Even if she is not fertile, she’s more likely to vocalize when she’s with a high-ranking male than with some low ranker. The benefit of this strategy could be that she avoids attacks from other females while confusing males about who’s going to be the dad, Townsend and his colleagues propose in the June PLoS ONE.

 

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?

 

MAMA!!

I’ve talked about Punkeys being mama’s boys in the past but here is an explanation of why. From Yahoo! India:

Why is it that some infants start crying as soon as they are separated from their mothers? Well, an American neuroscientist perhaps knows the reason.

Christina Barr of the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, Maryland, says that she has identified a gene mutation that determines whether or not infant monkeys make a fuss when their mothers are missing.

She strongly believes that her finding may shed light on why some children are cry-babies, while some are more independent.

“There are some kids that go with the flow and there are some that are very reluctant (to leave their mothers),” New Scientist magazine quoted her as saying.

Christina says that the bodies of infants and young animals release natural drugs called opioids when they spend time with their mothers, and molecular receptors on brain cells sop up these chemicals to provide temporary feelings of pleasure.

She has revealed that opiates act via the same receptors as morphine, and minute doses of the drug, not enough to sedate, quite young monkeys after their mothers leave.

Previous studies showed that 25 to 30 per cent of macaques have a genetic mutation in the mu-opioid receptor that makes them more sensitive to the brain chemicals.

With a view to establishing whether the mutation affects maternal attachment, Barr and her colleague Steve Suomi observed 97 six-month-old macaques, born in captivity, after they were separated from their mothers for several four-day stretches.

The researchers observed that all the infants howled the first time they faced life without their mother, but most of the animals grew accustomed to the separation and made less noise the next time they were separated.

However, it was not so for the animals with one or two copies of the opioid-enhancing mutation that continued to cry out for their absent mothers.

While such monkeys seemed to cherish reunions, and tended to spend more time with their mothers after each separation, macaques without the mutation did not make up for lost time.

“These animals were much more likely to want to stay in social contact with their mothers,” says Barr.

 

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.

 

Holla, Holla!!

After reading this article at Live Science, I’m starting to think that scientists are perverts with too much time on their hands:

Female monkeys may shout during sex to help their male partners climax, research now reveals.

To investigate the purpose behind these calls, scientists at the German Primate Center in Göttingen focused on Barbary macaques for two years in a nature reserve in Gibraltar.

The researchers found that females yelled during 86 percent of all sexual encounters. When females shouted, males ejaculated 59 percent of the time. However, when females did not holler, males ejaculated less than 2 percent of the time.

To see if yelling resulted from how vigorous the sex was, the scientists counted the number of pelvic thrusts males gave and timed when they happened. They found when shouting occurred, thrusting increased. In other words, hollering led to more vigorous sex.

What a horrible, horrible job! The counting of pelvic thrusts is bad enough, but then they need to verify ejaculation. How much does that job pay? Ugh.

Counting monkey pelvic thrusts is admittedly “quite weird, but it’s science,” researcher Dana Pfefferle, a behavioral scientist and primatologist at the German Primate Center, told LiveScience. “You get used to it.”

Yeah, you get used to it. After years of therapy and enough meds to kill a small horse.

Male and female Barbary macaques are promiscuous, often having sex with many partners. This means sperm levels can get quite drained. The females shout when they are most fertile, so males can make the most use of their sperm.

Man, talk about performance anxiety. How would you like to be nagged at while having sex? I think the males just want it to be over so they won’t get yelled at anymore.