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from the must-have-watched-'King-Kong' dept.
Cool. Calm. And oh, so calculated. That's how a chimpanzee living in the Royal Burgers' Zoo in the Netherlands set out to swat an aerial drone that was filming her group. In an article in the journal Primates² published by Springer, Jan van Hooff and Bas Lukkenaar explain it as yet another example of chimpanzees' make-do attitude to using whatever is on hand as tools.
The incident happened earlier this year, on 10 April, when a Dutch television crew was filming at the zoo in Arnhem. The idea was to use a drone to film the chimpanzees in their compound from different close-up angles. The drone already caught the chimpanzees' attention during a practice run. Some grabbed willow twigs off the ground, while four animals took these along when they climbed up scaffolding where the drone was hovering. This behavior is not frequently observed among these chimps.
Filming started when the next drone flew over. It zoomed in on two chimpanzees, the females Tushi and Raimee. They were still seated on the scaffolding holding on to twigs that were about 180 cm (ca. six feet) long. Tushi made two long sweeps with hers -- the second was successful in downing the drone and ultimately broke it. Before and during the strike, she grimaced. Although her face was tense and her teeth were bared, she showed no signs of fear. This suggests that she quite deliberately and forcefully struck at the drone, rather than fearfully or reflexively.
Fascinating. Evidence that drones do indeed provoke a response in the monkey ape brain, which could explain the drone antipathy felt by many humans. But what is it, a response to hovering insects or predatory birds?
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday September 06 2015, @09:06AM
The short version is that all apes are monkeys, but not all monkeys are apes.
Not according to modern classification. No monkeys are apes and no apes are monkeys.
All us primates share a common ancestor, and that common ancestor would very reasonably be considered a monkey were it still alive today.
No it wouldn't. See above. "Very reasonably" only in the sense that it probably looked a bit like one, but then I look a bit like a chimpanzee without being one. The last common ancestor of gorillas and chimps would have been neither a gorilla nor a chimp.
So, to be a bit more thorough -- but still far from complete -- we are humans; hominids; great apes; apes; monkeys; primates; mammals; reptiles; tetrapods; fish; vertebrates...eukaryotes...terrestrial life.
We're pretty obviously not fish or reptiles. We're not in the group reptilia and the accepted definition of "fish" specifically excludes tetrapods.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk