Do monkeys know how much fruit your sunglasses are worth? In episode 96 of Parsing Science, we talk with Jean-Baptiste "JB" Leca from the University of Lethbridge's Department of Psychology about his field research observing interactions among macaques at a Hindu temple in Bali. There, the monkeys have learned to rob tourists of everything from smartphones to flip flops, and then barter their return to temple staff in exchange for food. His open-access article, “Acquisition of object-robbing and object/food-bartering behaviours: a culturally maintained token economy in free-ranging long-tailed macaques,” was coauthored with Noëlle Gunst, Matthew Gardiner and I. Nengah Wandia, and published on January 11, 2021 in Philosophical Transactions of the the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
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Websites and other resources
Article Highlights, Summary, Quick findings & Flashcards via Scholarcy
JB's website, including photos of the robbing monkeys
JB's Google Scholar profile
University of Lethbridge's summary of the study
Sample videos of monkeys robbing and bartering:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymYDfHXq4S0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhqKux-liGk
News and Media
CBC | BBC | Medium | Earth Touch | Boing Boing | CTV News| Reddit | The Guardian
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