monkeyspear

This story’s not exactly breaking news, but it is terrifying.  Researchers at Iowa State University have observed chimpanzees in Senegal routinely making spears to hunt other vertebrates.  It’s the first documented instance of “habitual tool use by non-humans while hunting other vertebrates.”  So it isn’t just Campbell’s monkeys who are out to get us.

Chimpanzees forcibly jabbed tools into hollow trunks or branches multiple times and smelled and/or licked them upon extraction. Only two of the 22 reported cases were seen as playful — in the case of an infant male — or exploratory in nature. In all other cases, chimps were judged by the researchers to use monkeyspear2such force in inserting the tool that prey within the tree could have been injured. They witnessed just one case in which a chimpanzee extracted a bushbaby — a smaller primate — through use of the spear. [ScienceDaily]

That bushbaby had a name!  Steve. They need to do way to instain monkey* who kill bush babby because these babby cant frigth back.

* I shouldn’t have to explain this joke, but, just in case, here it is (and also here).