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posted by martyb on Saturday September 05 2015, @10:22PM   Printer-friendly
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?


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  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday September 07 2015, @12:29PM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Monday September 07 2015, @12:29PM (#233254) Homepage

    Yes, there are a lot of very common, overly simplistic explanations that are not backed up by any observed evidence that would explain what was observed.

    The simplest explanation in this case is that none of us know what actually happened, because you didn't keep notes of every instance or non-instance of this activity. All we've got is your recollection, which is as unreliable as any other human's memory (which is a surprising amount).

    None of that is supported by any observed evidence.

    There is no evidence. There's an anecdote.

    Dogs don't do that, and human memory isn't that unreliable.

    Yes, it is. It's crazily unreliable. Given ten minutes and a Photoshopped picture you can have people honestly "remembering" visits to countries they've never been to. What do you think the intervention of 10 or 20 years is going to do?

    That's why scientists like to take notes and run statistical analyses.

    (ironically, I used to have a perfect example of the unreliability of my own otherwise not-too-bad memory - but I can't remember it)

    Finally, there is one other simple explanation. You could be lying (I'm saying this only as devil's advocate). This is - currently - a simpler explanation than any involving hither-to undetected supernatural activity.

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