Capuchins Are Abducting Baby Howler Monkeys in Strange, Deadly New Trend

A young male capuchin named Joker may just be the world’s first primate influencer. But the trend he started—abducting babies belonging to a separate species—has deadly consequences. Joker is one of many white-faced capuchins living on Jicarón Island off the coast of Panama. Researchers had been using cameras to observe the behavior of these round-headed, stocky monkeys when, in 2022, something unusual caught the eye of Zoë Goldsborough, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute and a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. She was scrolling through camera-trap footage when she spotted a male capuchin carrying a baby monkey on its back. This was already an unusual sight—female primates are almost always the ones to carry the young. But upon closer inspection, it got even stranger. “I really quickly saw that the coloration was completely wrong,” Goldsborough told Gizmodo. “The capuchin monkeys have dark fur and light face, and this [baby] ... Read full article.