Manipulative Monkeys: The Capuchins of Lomas Barbudal

Front Cover
Harvard University Press, Feb 28, 2008 - Nature - 358 pages

With their tonsured heads, white faces, and striking cowls, the monkeys might vaguely resemble the Capuchin monks for whom they were named. How they act is something else entirely. They climb onto each other’s shoulders four deep to frighten enemies. They test friendship by sticking their fingers up one another’s noses. They often nurse—but sometimes kill—each other’s offspring. They use sex as a means of communicating. And they negotiate a remarkably intricate network of alliances, simian politics, and social intrigue. Not monkish, perhaps, but as we see in this downright ethnographic account of the capuchins of Lomas Barbudal, their world is as complex, ritualistic, and structured as any society.

Manipulative Monkeys takes us into a Costa Rican forest teeming with simian drama, where since 1990 primatologists Susan Perry and Joseph H. Manson have followed the lives of four generations of capuchins. What the authors describe is behavior as entertaining—and occasionally as alarming—as it is recognizable: the competition and cooperation, the jockeying for position and status, the peaceful years under an alpha male devolving into bloody chaos, and the complex traditions passed from one generation to the next. Interspersed with their observations of the monkeys’ lives are the authors’ colorful tales of the challenges of tropical fieldwork—a mixture so rich that by the book’s end we know what it is to be a wild capuchin monkey or a field primatologist. And we are left with a clear sense of the importance of these endangered monkeys for understanding human behavioral evolution.

 

Contents

Prologue
1
All in a Days Work
8
The Social Intelligence Debate and the Origins of the Lomas Barbudal Monkey Project
27
The Challenges of Foraging and SelfMedication
53
Predators Prey and Personality
72
Capuchin Communication
89
Abby and Tattle Two Females Political Careers
116
Curmudgeon The Career of an Alpha Male
134
Guapo Innovation and Tradition in the Creation of BondTesting Rituals
245
Social Learning and the Roots of Culture
264
Nobu and La Lucha sin Fin Conservation of Tropical Dry Forests
288
Epilogue
308
Cast of Characters
317
Timeline of Events in Abbys and Rambos Groups
325
Glossary of Behavioral Terms in the Capuchin Communicative Repertoire
329
Works Cited
332

Moth and Tranquilo The Strategies of Incoming Alpha Males
168
Kola and Jordan Lethal Aggression and the Importance of Allies
199
Miffin Nobu and Abby Capuchin Mothers Infants and Babysitters
220
Acknowledgments
347
Index
351
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information