Monkey Herds Goats; Farmer Approves
July 28, 2009—On a farm in India, Mani the monkey uses her own mysterious methods to tend dozens of goats without any supervision or training, according to the Associated Press.
In a story reported by the AP, every morning, a worker at the Palagapandi estate in India, opens the door to the pen and lets the goats and their kids out.
© 2009 National Geographic (AP)
Police believe monkey used to steal from business | Latest News | WFAA.com
RICHARDSON – The owners of a Richardson plant store almost couldn’t believe their eyes after viewing surveillance video after a recent theft. After a string of thefts at the store, the owners decided to put up security cameras in hopes of catching the bandits in action. However, their curiosity turned to shock when they said they saw what appeared to be a small monkey scooping up plants, flowers and accessories and handing it to someone waiting on the other side of a fence. The owners of Plants & Planters called Richardson police, who agreed it was a monkey in the video. "And she said, ‘You really aren’t going to believe this and I know you’re going to think I am crazy, but there is a monkey on this video," said Shelley Rosenfeld, the owner of Plants & Planters, of when the manager of the store called her after watching the video. "And I said, ‘Really?’ I mean, it’s really hard to believe a monkey would come over here and do it, but it’s pretty clear that it’s a monkey." Authorities said the monkey got off with a total of 30 to 40 plants, flowers and concrete statues. The owner said she asked police to not pursue the investigation because she actually found the incident humorous.
Raw Japan » Blog Archive » A monkey in sheep’s clothing | Blogs | A monkey in sheep’s clothing
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Monkeys Recognize Poor Grammar |
| Matt Kaplan for National Geographic News |
| July 8, 2009 |
| Monkeys can form sentences and speak in accents—and now a new study shows that our genetic relatives can also recognize poor grammar.
"We were really curious whether monkeys could even detect the common trend found in human language to add sounds to word edges, like adding ‘ed’ in English to create the past tense," said lead study author Ansgar Endress, a linguist at Harvard University. Previous research in cotton-top tamarins had shown that the animals can understand basic grammar, for instance, identifying which words logically follow other words in a sentence. But that same study, published in the journal Science in 2004, found that monkeys did not understand complex grammar, such as when words in a sentence depend on each other but are separated. While that study suggested monkeys were deaf to complex communication, the new research shows that tamarins can grasp at least one advanced concept: prefixes and suffixes. Wordplay For their study, Endress and colleagues played recordings of made-up English words to a population of captive cotton-top tamarins for roughly 30 minutes a day. Half of the tamarins were exposed to words with a varied stem but a constant suffix (such as bi-shoy, mo-shoy, and lu-shoy). The other half were exposed to a constant prefix followed by a varied stem (such as shoy-bi, shoy-mo, and shoy-lu). The following day, individual tamarins were brought into an observation enclosure equipped with an audio speaker and video-recording equipment to capture their behavior. These tamarins were then exposed to more words. Many of the words followed the same language rules that the tamarins had heard the day before, with half hearing "shoy" as a suffix and half hearing it as a prefix. However, every once in a while, the researchers would play a recording of an "incorrect" word. For instance, the speaker would broadcast "shoy" as a suffix when it had previously been presented as a prefix, or vice versa. Mental Machinery Other biologists who were not aware of the research question were asked to watch and note every time the small mammals turned their heads toward the speaker. When tamarins were exposed to words that "broke" the rules they had learned, they looked toward the speaker in a startled manner, observers noted. (Related: "Monkeys Can Subtract, Study Finds.") The finding is dramatic, Endress explained, because it reveals that our distant cousins seem to have the mental machinery to identify verbal structures like suffixes and prefixes. The research will appear this week in the journal Biology Letters. |
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