"Vegetarian orang-utans eat world's cutest animal"

That's the headline from New Scientist, reporting on a study published in the International Journal of Primatology.

I could just let that headline and adorable photo stand for itself. But no, it's my job, so I'm going to rub it in. Humans love to believe that our primate relatives are basically nicer people than we are, but this is the sort of thing we always find when we look more closely. And don't think these guys are just stumbling upon roadkill and figuring what the hell, it's already dead. It's quite deliberate and calculated:

In 2007 Hardus was tracking two orangs in the canopy above her – a female called Yet and her infant Yeni – when Yet abruptly changed direction and approached a slow loris (Nycticebus coucang). She knocked it out of the tree, crashed down to the ground, bit the stunned loris's head, then carried the body back into the tree to eat it. When Yeni begged, she was allowed to share the meat. The great apes each chomped on opposite ends of the dead primate, sharing it between them like lovers might a strand of spaghetti.

The researcher also found that in all documented cases the orang stunned the loris before proceeding. This is a precaution that shows some forethought, since slow lorises have another highly unusual quality aside from their extreme cuteness: they have toxic saliva, so you don't want to get bitten before you take a bite.

Oh, and if you don't believe it? Click on the link. She got video. In these days of cameras everywhere, even apes can't hide their bad behavior for long.


Tasty little fellow photographed by Flickr user underwhelmer.

Animals behaving humanly, part 2

Perhaps the most presumptuous behavior possible is an animal thinking it can actually replace us in our jobs.

It's bad enough if it's a fairly low paid profession, like the monkeys that wait tables in Japan, or the dog we met in an earler post who worked in a gas station.

Some animals have tried to usurp the place of much more skilled professionals, though. Fortunately, we'll see today and next time, some of them have gotten their comeuppance.

You've probably seen the stories about elephants and other animals painting pictures which are sold for fundraisers for zoos. The latest artistic star in the news is an orangutan at the Vienna Zoo, who's been taking photos, and in an even more up-to-date touch, posting them on a Facebook page. (And yes, with over 81,000 fans, she's more popular than you are.)

The truth is that the ape's motivations have nothing to do with artistic self-expression: the camera is rigged to dispense raisins when she clicks the shutter.

"Of course the apes don't care about the pictures, they are just an accidental side product," a zoo spokesman has been widely quoted as saying, but in case you're not convinced, the esteemed National Geographic took it upon themselves to get to the bottom of the story of this pretentious primate. In an interview, the deputy director of the zoo, Harald Schwammer, said:

The company Samsung came up with the suggestion. It was their idea to advertise their camera! For me as zoologist and curator, it is an enrichment project with some opportunities for behavioral studies. To be clear, the orang does not know that it is making pictures with the camera!

All of the orangs in the group manipulate the instrument and turn a switch. After this switch is turned, a raisin falls out. By turning the switch, the photo is taken. Therefore, the orangutan does not know that this is a camera and that they are making pictures, they are only trying to get a reward from the machine.

It is just like the elephant paintings that are going around the world with false information: elephants are not able to paint a tree or flowers; they are trained for this. There is no creative touch, no artistic approach!

We've seen before on this blog that orangs have a knack for using objects to make trouble,and Schwammer reminds us to be careful what we give an orang to play with:

There was nothing surprising concerning the orangutans' behavior. We knew that they use and manipulate every object they touch. If you give them a machine-gun, they will soon find out how to shoot it.

Photo of one of her suspicious-looking orang comrades - purely accidentally, of course - by Nonja.

Ambivalent intelligent badness

If you happen to forget a screwdriver in the gorilla cage, the animals will hesitantly approach it, briefly sniff it, and subsequently ignore it.

Leave it in a chimp cage, and it will be used in vigorous display, thrown about, and forgotten.

But if you leave it in the orangutan cage, one of the animals will unobtrusively pick it up, hide it, and use it to let itself out when you’ve left for the day.

– Benjamin Beck, author of Animal Tool Behavior (quoted here).

If you've ever doubted that apes have minds like ours, especially the much more alien-looking orangutan, check out this story. Here's an animal that not only can figure out how to use the wrong tool for the job, but can have second thoughts about it once it's done. I don't know what could be more human.

NEW ORLEANS - Using only a stretched green T-shirt and powerful upper-body strength, a Sumatran orangutan named Berani escaped from his Audubon Zoo enclosure Friday -- for about 10 minutes.

Employing a level of cunning that could have come from a prison movie, the brownish-orange primate stretched the shirt, scaled a 10 1/2-foot wall to the top of the moat, wrapped the shirt around the "hot" electrical wires surrounding the exhibit and swung out about 12:45 p.m., zoo spokeswoman Sarah Burnette said.

Berani means "brave" in Bornean, Burnette said, but on Friday afternoon, it could have meant "reluctant."

"He seemed like he wanted to get back into the exhibit," Burnette said. "That's the way it is in zoos. . . . He jumped over the enclosure and jumped back in."

Berani, who didn't harm anyone, used a T-shirt that had been tossed into the enclosure as a toy for the 150-pound adolescent male and two female orangs, Blaze and Feliz....

Berani was "very congenial, not threatening," she said. "He wanted to explore a little bit and figured it was time to get back home because his zookeeper was yelling at him."

...The zoo also likely will adjust the mix of primate playthings.

"We gave them T-shirts every day," Burnette said. "Not anymore."

Read the whole article by John Pope at the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Photo from Wikipedia by Tom Low