Rhesus macaques, which are some of the best studied of all monkeys, establish hierarchies in their social groups. Whenever two macaques tussle over a piece of food, say, or the right to mate, the monkey with the higher rank usually wins. Primatologists have established that monkeys of a lower social status are generally more stressed [...]

Yay, more primates. Right? Before moving on to other things (the list of subjects that need to be covered at Tet Zoo ASAP is now worryingly and impractically long), I must finish with the Proboscis monkey Nasalis larvatus [adjacent photo by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen]. In the previous article I discussed various aspects of this fascinating monkey’s [...]

I am perpetually interested in monkeys. One of the most remarkable and interesting of them all has to be the uniquely Bornean Proboscis monkey Nasalis larvatus, also sometimes called the Long-nosed monkey or Bekantan. Proboscis monkeys are famously named for the enormous, pendant, tongue-shaped noses of adult males; those of juveniles and females are shorter [...]

A trip to an unfamiliar part of the world is all you need in order to realize that humans have vastly different ways of eating, playing, talking, problem-solving, and so much more. Some of us use forks, while others prefer chopsticks, and still others simply eat with their hands. All three of these solutions emerged [...]

As a child – okay, even still as an adult – I couldn’t get enough of adventure stories with animals at the center, whether in text or on the screen. Jack London’s Call of the Wild comes to mind, or Disney’s The Jungle Book. More recently, books like Bonobo Handshake, by Vanessa Woods (see my [...]